
Glass 
Book. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



LECTURES 



ON THE 



English Language 



BY ^ 

GEORGE P. MARSH 
FIRST SERIES 



What! crane you wine, and haue Nilus to drinke of?" 

Pescennius Niger to his Soldiers in Egypt, 

G. Sandys's Belatwn, 1615, p. 99. 



REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION. 






NEW YORE: 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1885. 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by 

CHARLES SCRIBNER, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of 

New York. 



Copyright, 1884, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 



EDWARD O. JENKINS 1 SONS, NEW YORK. 



TO MY DEAR WIFE, 

CAROLINE CRANE MARSH, 

WHO DEVOTED TO ME HER YOUTH AND BEAUTY AND HAS GIVEN ME 

HER MATURER AGE, HAVING BEEN, FOR MORE THAN FORTY YEARS, 

MY EVER FAITHFUL AND MOST AFFECTIONATE COMPANION, MY 

WISEST COUNSELLOR AND MY MOST EFFICIENT AID, 

ffttjis Book, 

WHICH OWES, IN LARGE MEASURE, TO HER CULTURE AND HER TASTE 
WHATEVER IT MAY POSSESS OF 

CRITICAL AND /ESTHETICAL MERIT, 

IS 

LOVINGLY AND REVERENTLY DEDICATED. 




PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 



These Lectures are now offered to the public in the 
form in which they were left by the Author after a 
final revision. It will be seen that there are occasional 
modifications in the text — the result of fresh light 
thrown on certain points by the critical research of the 
last twenty years ; and much additional matter will be 
found in the new notes which, it is believed, will in- 
crease in no small degree the value of the work. 



(v) 



PEEFACE 



In pursuance of a plan for enlarging the means of education 
afforded by Columbia College in the city of 'New York, courses 
of instruction, called Post-graduate Lectures, were organized in 
the summer of 1858. I was invited by the Trustees of that 
institution to give readings on the English language. The Lec- 
tures which compose the present volume were prepared and 
delivered in the autumn and winter of 1858-1859, and they are 
printed very nearly in their original form. The title " Post- 
graduate " and the Introductory Address sufficiently indicate the 
class of persons for whom they were designed. It was supposed 
that the course might extend through two terms, and the plan of 
the Lectures was arranged accordingly. The purpose of the first 
or introductory series was to excite a more general interest among 
educated men and women in the history and essential character 
of their native tongue, and to recommend the study of the lan- 
guage in its earlier literary monuments rather than through the 
medium of grammars and linguistic treatises. The second term 
would have been devoted to what might be called a grammatical 
history of English literature, or a careful and systematic exami- 
nation of the origin and progressive development of English, as 
exhibited in actual practice by the best native writers. 

This statement will explain many apparent deficiencies in the 

Lectures now published, and especially the omission of any 

notice of the minor dramatists, and of the Scottish dialect and 

other local peculiarities of English, as well as the small amount 

(vii) 



V1U PEEFACE. 

of critical discussion upon the diction, style, and literary merits 
of different authors. 

In selecting illustrations, I have chosen to draw attention to 
the less known fields of our literature, and I have had recourse 
to works neither so rare as to be inaccessible, nor, though highly 
deserving, so common as to be familiar, to most readers. Hence 
I have seldom cited Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, or other au- 
thors whose productions are, or ought to be, in every man's 
hands, though I am aware that they would often have supplied 
more apposite quotations than those I have employed. In the 
number of illustrations I have been sparing, and I have intro- 
duced only so many as I thought necessary to make my meaning 
plain, and, in two or three important cases, to establish the point 
for which I was contending. It would have been easy to make 
a show of cheap learning by multiplying extracts, but I have 
preferred, after pointing out sufficient, and I fear for the most 
part neglected, sources of instruction, to leave to the reader the 
pleasant and profitable task of seeking authorities for himself. 

The Lectures are addressed to the many, not to the few ; to 
those who have received such an amount of elementary dis- 
cipline as to qualify them to become their own best teachers in 
the attainment of general culture, not to the professed gram- 
marian or linguistic inquirer. The well-edited republications of 
old English authors which have issued from the Boston press, 
the learned and valuable labors of Mr. Klipstein in Anglo-Saxon 
philology, and the admirable elucidations of Shakespeare by Mr. 
White and other American critics, abundantly prove the exist- 
ence among us of the knowledge and the taste, the further pro- 
motion of which has been my special aim. These studies are, 
we may hope, soon to receive a new impulse and new aids from 
the publication of a complete dictionary of the English lan- 
guage — a work of prime necessity to all the common moral and 
literary interests of the British and American people, and which 
is now in course of execution by the London Philological So- 



PEEFACE. IX 

ciet j, upon a plan, and with a command of facilities, that promise 
the most satisfactory results. 

I have only to add, that the occasional allusions to the political 
condition of Europe are to be understood with reference to the 
time when the Lectures were delivered, and that subsequent 
events have not weakened the convictions I have expressed on 
this important subject. 

Burlington, Vt., October 25, 1859. 



PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION. 



In this edition, numerous errors of the copyists of my manu- 
script and of the press, which through inexperience in proof- 
reading I had failed to detect, as well as many inadvertences of 
my own, are corrected, and the appendix is much enlarged. The 
additions consist principally of citations and proofs in illustra- 
tion of statements and opinions not sufficiently supported before. 

It is with some reluctance that I have multiplied my excerpts 
and references, because I know that though, in a country not 
familiar to him, the true angler is thankful to be told where lie 
the clear lakelets and the fishy brooks, yet he desires no man to 
catch his trout for him. 

But the wealth of English literature is such, that I need not 
fear to exhaust its stores by twenty pages of quotation ; and he 
who patiently explores its abundant waters, will not fail to find, 
that, after all that I and other laborers have extracted, there are 
still as good fish in the sea as ever were caught. 

In this edition I entitle this volume, First Series, because I am 
about to publish a second, consisting of a course of Lectures de- 
livered at the Lowell Institute upon the history of the English 
language, and particularly of its lexical and grammatical changes, 
with special reference to its literary capabilities and adaptations. 

Burlington, Vt., January 1, 1861. 

(xi) 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

LECTUKE I. 
Introductory, 1 



LECTUKE II. 
Origin of Speech, and of the English Language, . . .23 

LECTURE III. 
Practical Uses of Etymology, 45 

LECTURE IV. 
Foreign helps to the knowledge of English, 66 

LECTURE Y. 
Study of Early English, 85 

LECTURE VI. 

Sources, Composition, and Etymological proportions of Eng- 
lish— L, 101 

LECTURE VII. 

Sources and Composition of English — II., £-"''. . . . .130 

LECTURE VIII. 

The Vocabulary of the English Language — I., , 148 

LECTURE IX. 

The Vocabulary of the English Language— II., . „ . .166 

(xiii) 



XIV TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

LECTUKE X. 

PAGE 

The Vocabulaby of the English Language — III., .... 189 

LECTURE XL 
The Vocabulaby of the English Language — IV., .... 206 

LECTURE XII. 
The Vocabulaby of the English Language — V., . 226 

LECTURE XIII. 
Intebjections and Intonations, 243 

LECTURE XIV. 
The Noun, the Adjective, and the Vebb, 255 

LECTURE XV. 
Gbammatical Inflections — I., 274 

LECTURE XVI. 
Gbammatical Inflections — II., 293 

LECTURE XVII. 
Gbammatical Inflections — III., . . . . . . . 310 

LECTURE XVIII. 
Gbammatical Inflections— IV., 325 

LECTURE XIX. 
English as affected by the Abt of Pbinting — I., .... 351 

LECTURE XX. 
English as affected by the Abt of Pbinting — II., .... 369 

LECTURE XXI. 

English as affected by the Abt of Pbinting — III. , 383 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. XV 



LECTURE XXII. 

PAGE 

Orthoepical changes in English, 402 



LECTURE XXIII. 
Rhyme, 429 

LECTURE XXIV. 
Accentuation and Double Rhymes, 443 

LECTURE XXV. 
Alliteration, Line-Rhyme, and Assonance, 464 

LECTURE XXVI. 
Synonyms, . 489 

LECTURE XXVII. 
Principles op Translation, 511 

LECTURE XXVIII. 
English Bible, . . . 529 

LECTURE XXIX. 
Corruptions of English, 551 

LECTURE XXX. 
The English Language in America, 568 



LECTURES 



ON 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



LECT UEE I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

The severe Roman bestowed upon the language of his country 
the appellation of patrius serrno, the paternal or national 
speech ; but we, deriving from the domesticity of Saxon life a 
truer and tenderer appreciation of the best and purest source of 
linguistic instruction, more happily name our home-born English 
the mother-tongue. The tones of the native language are the 
medium through which the affections and the intellect are first 
addressed, and they are to the heart and the head of infancy what 
the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast is to the physical 
frame. " Speech," in the words of Heyse, " is the earliest or- 
ganic act of free self -consciousness, and the sense of our person- 
ality is first developed in the exercise of the faculty of speech." 
Without entering upon the speculations of the Nominalists and 
the Realists, we must admit that, in the process of ratiocination 
properly called thought, the mind acts only by words. " Co g i t o , 
ergo sum, I think, therefore I am," said Descartes. "Whether 
this is a logical conclusion or not, we habitually, if not necessarily, 
connect words, thought, and self -recognizing existence, as condi- 
tions each of both the others, and hence it is that we have little 
or no recollection of that portion of our lif e which preceded our 
acquaintance with language. Indeed, so necessary are words to 
thought, to reflection, to the memory of former states of self- 
conscious being, that though the intelligence of persons born 



2 INTEODUCTOEY. [Lect. i. 

without the sense of hearing sometimes receives, through the 
medium of manual signs, and without instruction in words, a 
very considerable degree of apparent culture, yet, when deaf- 
mutes are educated and taught the use of verbal language, they 
are generally almost wholly unable to recall their mental status 
at earlier periods ; and, so far as we are able to judge, they ap- 
pear to have been previously devoid of those conceptions which 
we acquire, or at least retain and express, by means of general 
terms. So, our recollection of moments of intense pain or pleas- 
ure, moral or physical, is dim and undefined. Grief too big for 
words, joy which finds no articulate voice for utterance, sensa- 
tions too acute for description, when once their cause is removed, 
or when time has abated their keenness, leave traces deep indeed 
in tone, but too shadowy in outline to be capable of distinct re- 
production ; for that alone which is precisely formulated can be 
clearly remembered. 

Nature has made speech the condition and vehicle of social 
intercourse, and consequently it is essentially so elementary a dis- 
cipline, that a thorough knowledge of the mother-tongue seems 
to be presupposed as the basis of all education, and especially as 
an indispensable preparation for the reception of academic in- 
struction. It is doubtless for this reason, that, in our American 
system of education, the study of the English language has usually 
been almost wholly excluded from the collegial curriculum, and 
recently indeed from humbler seminaries ; and therefore so great 
a novelty as its abrupt transfer from the nursery to the auditorium 
of a post-graduate course, may seem to demand both explanation 
and apology. 

It is a trite remark, that the national history and the national 
language begin to be studied only in their decay, and scholars 
have sometimes shown an almost superstitious reluctance to ap- 
proach either, lest they should contribute to the aggravation of a 
symptom whose manifestation might tend to hasten the catas- 
trophe of which it is the forerunner. Indeed, if we listen to 
some of the voices around us, we are in danger of being persuaded 
that the decline of our own tongue has not only commenced, bat 
has already advanced too far to be averted or even arrested. If 
it is true, as is intimated by the author of our most widely circu- 
lated dictionary — a dictionary which itself does not explain the 



Lect. i.] mTKODTJCTORY. 3 

vocabulary of Paradise Lost — that it is a violation of the present 
standard of good taste to employ old English words not used by 
Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper ; if words which 
enter into the phraseology of Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Mil- 
ton, though important " to the antiquary, are useless to the great 
mass of readers "; and, above all, if the dialect of the authorita- 
tive standard of the Christian faith, in the purest, simplest, and 
most beautiful form in which it has been presented to modern 
intelligence, is obsolete, unintelligible, forgotten, then, indeed, 
the English language is decayed, extinct, fossilized, and, like 
other organic relics of the past, a fit subject for curious antiqua- 
rian research and philosophic investigation, but no longer a theme 
of living, breathing interest. 

In reasoning from the past to the present, we are apt to forget 
that Protestant Christianity and the invention of printing have 
entirely changed the outward conditions of at least Gothic, not to 
say civilized, humanity, and so distinguished this new phase of 
Indo-European life from that old world which lies behind us, 
that, though all which was true of individual man in the days of 
Plato and of Seneca and of Abelard is true now, yet most which 
was then conceived to be true of man as a created and dependent, 
or as a social being, is at this day recognized as either false or 
abnormal. The reciprocal relations between the means and the 
ends of human life are reversed, and the conscious, deliberate 
aims and voluntary processes and instrumentalities of intellectual 
action are completely revolutionized. Hence, we are constantly 
in danger of error, when, in the economy of social man, we apply 
ancient theories to modern facts, and deduce present effect or pre- 
dict future consequences from causes which, in remote ages, have 
produced results analogous to recent or expected phenomena. 
This is especially true with reference to those studies and those 
pursuits which are less immediately connected with the fleeting 
interests of the hour. We are, accordingly, not warranted in 
concluding that, because the creative spirits of ancient and flour- 
ishing Hellenic literature did not concern themselves with gram- 
matical subtleties, but left the syntactical and orthoepical theories 
of the Greek language to be developed in late and degenerate 
Alexandria, therefore the study of native philology in commer- 
cial London and industrial Manchester proves the decadence of 



4 INTEODUCTOET. [Lect. I. 

the heroic speech which, in former centuries, embodied the epic 
and dramatic glories of English genius. 

The impulse to the study of English, and especially of its ear- 
lier forms, which has lately begun to be felt in England and in 
this country, is not a result of the action of domestic causes. It 
has not grown out of any thing in the political or social condi- 
tion of the English and American people, or oat of any morbid 
habit of the common language and literature of both, but it had 
its origin wholly in the contagion of Continental example. 

The jealousies and alarms of the turbulent period which fol- 
lowed the first French Revolution, and which suspended the in- 
dependent political existence of so many of the minor European 
States, at the same time threatening all with ultimate absorption, 
naturally stimulated the self-conscious individuality of every race, 
and led them alike to attach special value to every thing character- 
istic, every thing peculiar, in their own constitution, their own pos- 
sessions, their own historic recollections, as conservative elements, 
as means of resistance against an influence which sought, first, 
to denationalize, and then to assimilate them all to its own social 
and governmental system. Hence, contemporaneously with the 
wars of that eventful crisis, there sprung up a universal spirit of 
local inquiry, local pride, and local patriotism ; the history, the 
archaeology, the language, the early literature, of every European 
people, became objects of earnest study, first with its own schol- 
ars, then with allied nations or races, and, finally, by the power 
of international sympathy, and the unexpected light which ety- 
mological researches have thrown on some of the most interest- 
ing questions belonging to present psychology and to past history, 
with enlightened and philosophic thinkers everywhere. 

The people of England were less agitated by the fears which 
disturbed the repose of the Continental nations, and they are con- 
stitutionally slow in yielding either to moral, to intellectual, or to 
material influences from without. Accordingly, while the phi- 
lologists and historians of Denmark* and of Germany were stu- 

* Thorkelin had prepared the poem of Beowulf for publication as early as 
1807, but the press copy was destroyed in the siege of Copenhagen. He, how- 
ever, renewed his labors, and in 1815, brought out the first edition of that im- 
portant work. Five years later, Grundtvig published a Danish version of Beo- 
wulf, with emendations, in a great measure conjectural, of the original printed 



Lect. i.] INTKODUCTOKY. 5 

diously investigating and elucidating the course of Anglo-Saxon 
history, the laws of the Anglo-Saxon language, and the character 
of its literature, as things cognate with their own past glories and 
future aspirations, few native English inquirers busied themselves 
with studies whose obscure, though real, connection with the 
stirring events of that epoch no timid sensitiveness had yet taught 
the British mind to feel. It was only when the new political 
relations between England and the important Germanic States 
had awakened the dormant moral and intellectual sympathies be- 
tween these nations, that the literature and the learning of Ger- 
many became objects of interest and sources of instruction to 
British scholars. To that period we trace the first impulses 
whose gradual action has led to the tardy revival of national 
philology in England, and the labors of Danish and German 
linguists form the real groundwork of all that native inquirers 
have since accomplished. If I were to refer to any individual as 
having been specially influential in this direction, I should cite 
the example and the labors of Max Miiller. Muller has not, so 
far as I know, made old English philology a specialty, but he has 
given an immense impulse to the revived study of Oriental and 
general Linguistics, and this, by the commune vinculum which 
exists between all knowledges, has made itself felt in every de- 
partment of English intellectual effort. If we compare the criti- 
cal and scientific Periodical Literature of England at the begin- 
ning with that at the end of the generation now drawing to its 
close, we shall find an advance seldom paralleled in the history 
of human culture. This difference is, I believe, in a great meas- 
ure to be ascribed to the influence I have mentioned. 

But although the interest now manifested in the history and 
true linguistic character of the English speech originated in ex- 
ternal movements, yet it must be admitted that it is, at this mo- 
ment, strengthened in England by a feeling of apprehension con- 
cerning the position of that country in coming years — an appre- 
hension which, notwithstanding occasional manifestations of heredi- 
ty Tkorkelin. These are among the earliest and most successful instances of the 
application of sound learning and critical sagacity to the restoration of corrupt 
texts. Rask, also a Dane, published in 1817, the first complete Anglo-Saxon 
grammar, and this has only lately been superseded by the labors of our coun- 
tryman, Prof. March. 



6 INTKODUCTOKY. [Lect. i. 

tarj confidence and pride, is a very widely prevalent sentiment 
among the British people. Recent occurrences have inspired an 
anxiety amounting almost to alarm, concerning their relations 
with their nearest, as well as their more remote, Continental 
neighbors, and those who compare the policy and position of 
England in 1815, 1851, and 1859, may well be pardoned for 
some misgivings with regard to the present tendencies of the 
British social and political state. In such circumstances, it is 
natural that enlightened Englishmen should cherish a livelier at- 
tachment to all that is great and reverend in the memories of 
their early being, and thought, and action, and should regard 
with increasing interest the monuments that record the series of 
intellectual and physical triumphs by which the Anglo-Saxon and 
the Norman raised the Empire they successively conquered to 
such an unexampled pitch of splendor and of power. 

Modern philology, then, did not, like ancient grammatical lore, 
originate in the life-and-death struggle of perishing nationalities, 
nor in a morbid consciousness of internal decay and approaching 
dissolution, but in a sound, philosophic appreciation of the surest 
safeguard of national independence and national honor — an in- 
telligent comprehension, namely, of what is good and what is 
great in national history, national institutions, national character. 
It is a pulsation of life, not a throe of death ; a token of regen- 
eration, not a sign of extinction. The zeal with which these 
studies are pursued is a high 'expression of intellectual patriotism, 
a security against the perils of absorption and centralization which 
are again menacing the commonwealths of the Eastern Continent, 
a bulwark against the dangers with which what exists of Conti- 
nental liberty is threatened, now by the ambitious dreams of 
French Caesarism and of German ' nationality,' now by Musco- 
vite barbarism, and now by pontifical obscurantism. 

The fruits of increased attention to domestic philology have 
been strikingly manifested in the reviving literatures, and in the 
awakening moral and political energies, of many lesser European 
peoples, which, until the agitations I speak of, seemed to be fast 
sinking into forgetfulness and inaction. States and races, long 
deemed insignificant and decrepit, have given a fresh impulse 
to the intellectual movement of our age, and, at the same time, 
are throwing up new barricades against the encroachments of 



Lect. I.] INTRODUCTORY. 7 

the great Continental despotisms. Denmark, Norway, Swe- 
den, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, have ronsed themselves to 
the creation of new letters, and the manifestation of a new 
popular life. The European Continent is to-day protesting 
against being Teutonized, as energetically as it did, at the begin- 
ning of this century, against a forced conformity to a Gallic or- 
ganization ; and we may well hope that the same spirit will be 
found equally potent to resist the Panslavic invasion, which will 
be the next source of danger to the civil and intellectual liberties 
of Christendom. 

There are circumstances in the inherent character of the Eng- 
lish language winch recommend — there are circumstances in its 
position which demand — the most sedulous and persevering in- 
vestigation. I will not here speak of what belongs to another 
part of our course— the general value and importance of lin- 
guistic inquiry — but I will draw your attention to the multi- 
farious etymology of our Babylonish vocabulary, and to the com- 
posite structure of our syntax, as peculiarities of the English 
tongue not shared in an equal degree by any other European 
speech known in literature, and requiring an amount of system- 
atic study not in other cases usually necessary. The groundwork 
of English, indeed, can be, and best is, learned at the domestic 
fireside — a school for which there is no adequate substitute ; but 
the knowledge there acquired is not, as in homogeneous lan- 
guages, a root out of which will spontaneously grow the flowers 
and the fruits which adorn and enrich the speech of man. Eng- 
lish has been so much affected by extraneous, alien, and discord- 
ant influences, so much mixed with foreign ingredients, so much 
overloaded with adventitious appendages, that it is, to most of 
those who speak it, in a considerable degree a conventional and 
arbitrary symbolism. The Anglo-Saxon tongue has a craving 
and accommodating appetite, and is as rapacious of words and as 
tolerant of forms, as are its children of territory and of religions. 
But, in spite of its power of assimilation, there is much of the 
speech of England which has never become connatural to the 
Anglican people, and its grammar has passively suffered the in- 
troduction of many syntactical combinations which are not merely 
irregular, but repugnant. It has lost its original organic law of 
progress, and its present growth is by accretion, not by develop- 



8 INTRODUCTOEY. [Lect. I. 

merit. I shall not here inquire whether this condition of Eng- 
lish is an evil. There are many cases where a complex and cun- 
ningly-devised machine, dexterously guided, can do that which the 
congenital hand fails to accomplish ; but the computing of our 
losses and gains, the striking of our linguistic balance, belongs 
elsewhere. Suffice it to say, that English is not a language which 
teaches itself by mere unreflecting usage. It can be mastered, in 
all its wealth, in all its power, only by conscious, persistent labor ; 
and, therefore, when all the world is awaking to the value of 
general philological science, it would ill become us to be slow in 
recognizing the special importance of the study of our own 
tongue.* 

But, in order that this study may commend itself to the popu- 
lar mind, its value and its interest must first be made apparent 
to the thinking spirits by whom the current of public opinion is 
determined. Knowledge has its sources on the heights of hu- 
manity, and culture derives its authority from the example of the 
acknowledged leaders of society. Studies neglected or under- 
valued by the educated man, will have still less attraction for the 
pupil, and English philology cannot win its way to a form in 
American high-schools, until it shall have been recognized as a 
worthy pursuit by the learned and the wise, who are no longer 
subject to the authority of academic teachers. 

But, great as is the practical importance of the knowledge of 
words, let it not be said that, for its sake alone, we encourage in 7 
quiry into the structure and constitution of national speech. The 

* For easie obtaining is enemie to iudgement, not onlie in words and na- 
turall speche, but in greater matters and verie important. Aduised & con- 
siderat cumming by, as it proves by tliose tungs, which we learn by art, where 
time and trauell be the compassing means, emplanteth in wits both certaintie 
to rest on & assurance to rise by. Our natural tung cummeth on vs by hudle, 
and therefor hedelesse, foren language is labored, and therefor learned, the 
one still in vse and neuer well known, the other well known and verie seldom 
vsed. And yet continewal vse should enf er knowledge, in a thing of such 
vse, as the naturall deliurie of our mind and meaning is. And to saie the 
truth what reason is it, to be acquainted abrode and a stranger at home ? to 
know foren tungs by rule, and our own but by rote ? If all other men had 
been so affected, to make much of the foren, and set light by their own, as 
we seme to do, we had neuer had these things we like of so much, we should 
neuer by comparing haue discerned the better — Richard Mulcaster, First Part 
of the Elernentarie, 1682, p. 167. 



Lect. i.] ESTRODUCTOKY. 9 

discipline we advocate embraces a broader range, and extends 
itself to the scientific notion of philology, which, though f amiliar 
in German literature, has not yet become the recognized mean- 
ing of the word in English. The course we propose includes, 
naturally and necessarily, the study of those old English writers, 
in whose works we find, not only the most forcible forms of ex- 
pression, but a marvellous affluence of the mighty thoughts out 
of which has grown the action that has made England and her 
children the wonder and the envy of the world. With respect 
to the technicalities of primitive grammar and etymology, the 
radical forms of structure which characterize our ancient tongue, 
the American student has but narrow means of original research. 
His investigations must, for the present, be pursued at second 
hand, by the aid of materials inadequate in themselves, and too 
often collected with little judgment or discrimination. The 
standard of linguistic science in England is, or rather till recently 
has been, comparatively low. British scholars have produced 
few satisfactory discussions of Anglo-Saxon or Old-English in- 
flectional or structural forms, and it is to Teutonic zeal and learn- 
ing that we must still look for the elucidation of many points of 
interest connected with the form and the signification of primi- 
tive English. A large proportion of the relics of Anglo-Saxon 
and of early English literature remains yet unpublished, or has 
been edited with so little sound learning and critical ability as to 
serve less to guide than to lead astray. Hence, in the determina- 
tion of ancient texts, we must often accept hasty conjecture, or 
crude opinion, in place of established fact. But a better era has 
commenced. Englishmen have learned from Continental lin- 
guists to do what native scholarship and industry had hitherto 
failed to accomplish ; * and we may hope that, at no distant day, 

* The recent admirable editions of Layamon, of the Ormulum, and of the 
Wycliffite translations of the Scriptures, are exceedingly valuable contributions 
to English philology, and in the highest degree creditable to the critical skill 
and industry of the eminent scholars who have prepared and published them. 
The publications of the various Literary Societies which occupy themselves 
with old English literature, are of very unequal value, and some of them, cer- 
tainly, both intrinsically worthless, and badly edited. But, notwithstanding 
the sneers of Garnett,f there are few students of our early literature who have 

t See latter part of last note to p. 304. 



10 INTKODTJCTOKY. [Lect. I. 

the jet hidden treasures of British, philology will all be made 
accessible, and permanently secured for future study, by means 
of the art which has been styled 

Ars omnium Artium Conservatrix. 

The general inferiority of English and French to Scandinavian 
and Teutonic scholars, in philological and especially etymological 
research, is a remarkable but an indisputable fact, and its ex- 
planation is not obvious. I can by no means ascribe the differ- 
ence to an inherent inaptitude on our part for such subtle inves- 
tigations, to a native insensibility to the delicate relations between 
allied sounds and allied significations ; but I believe the cause to 
lie much in the different intellectual habits which are formed, in 
early life, by the use of the respective languages of these nations. 
The German is remarkably homogeneous in its character. An 
immense proportion of its vocabulary consists either of simple 
primitives, or of words obviously drawn by composition or deri- 
vation from radicals still existing in current use as independent 
vocables. Its grammatical structure is of great regularity, and 
there are few tongues where the conformity to general rules is so 
universal, and where isolated, unrelated philological facts are so 
rare. At the same time, there is enough of grammatical inflec- 
tion to familiarize the native speaker with syntactical principles 
imperfectly exemplified in French and English, and there is a 
sufficiently complex arrangement of the period to call into con- 
stant exercise the logical faculties required for the comprehension 
and application of the rules of universal grammar. While, there- 
fore, I by no means maintain that German has any superiority 
over English for the purposes of poetry or of miscellaneous litera- 
ture, for those of general social intercourse or the ordinary cares 
and duties of life, yet, as in itself an intellectual and especially a 
linguistic discipline, it has great advantages over any of the 



not derived very important aid from the labors of Halliwell and of Wright. 
The value of Kemble's and Thorpe's contributions to our knowledge of the 
Anglo-Saxon language and literature is too familiar to require special notice ; 
and I need not here speak of the eminent British ethnological and grammatical, 
or rather linguistic, inquirers of the present day, because this course of lectures 
is confined to quite another field, and I shall only incidentally have occasion 
to refer to them. 



Lect. I.] LNTKODUCTOKY. 11 

tongues which embody the general literature of modern Eu- 
rope. The German boy comes out of the nursery scarcely a 
worse grammarian, and a far better etymologist, than the ancient 
Koman, and is already imbued with a philological culture which 
the Englishman and the Frenchman can only acquire by years of 
painful study. Hence we account readily for the comparative 
excellence of the German dictionaries and other helps to the full 
knowledge of the language, while in English, having no gram- 
mar, we have till lately possessed no grammars, and we still want 
a dictionary. In both English and French, the etymology is 
foreign or obscured by great changes of form, the syntax is arbi- 
trary arid conventional (so far as those terms can be applied to any 
thing in language), the inflections are bald and imperfectly distin- 
guished, and the number of solitary exceptional facts, especially in 
French, is very great. When I speak of the poverty of French 
inflections, I am aware I contradict the accidence, which shows a 
very full system of varied terminations ; but the native language 
is learned by the ear, and the spoken tongue of France reduces 
its multitude of written endings to a very small list of articulated 
ones. The signs of number and of person, and often of tense 
and gender, to which the inflections are restricted, though well 
marked in written French, disappear almost wholly in pronun- 
ciation, and for those who only speak, they are non-existent.* 
While, therefore, for speaking French by rote, as natives do all 
tongues, no grammar is needed, yet few written dialects require 
grammatical aid more imperiously; but, at the same time, the 
grammar is of so special a character as to teach little of general 
•linguistic principle. 

The German philologist, then, begins where the Englishman 
and the Frenchman leave off — or, rather, at a point to which the 
great mass of French and English literary men never attain ; 
and, with such an advantage in the starting ground, it would be 
strange if he did not outstrip his rivals. 

The American student shares with the Englishman and French- 
man in the lack of early grammatical discipline, and, possessing 



* Aimais, aimait, aimaient are identical in sound ; and aimer, aimez, aimai, 
aime, aimes, aimee, and aimees, differ so little from the former group, that 
ignorant persons often confound them all in writing, as well as in speaking. 



12 INTRODUCTORY. [LECT. I. 

few large libraries, no collections of early editions, no repositories 
of original manuscripts, he labors under the further inconven- 
ience of a want of access to the primitive sources of etymological 
instruction. For the present, therefore, he must renounce the 
ambition of adding anything to the existing stores of knowledge 
respecting English philology, and content himself with the hum- 
bler and more selfish aim of appropriating and elaborating the 
material which more fortunate and better trained European 
scholars have gathered or discovered. We must, in the main, 
study English with reference to practical use, rather than to 
philosophic principle ; aim at the positive and the concrete, rather 
than the absolute and the abstract. And this falls in with what 
is eminently, I will not say happily, the present tendency of the 
American mind. We demand, in all things, an appreciable, 
tangible result, and if a particular knowledge cannot be shown 
to have a value, it is to little purpose to recommend its cultiva- 
tion because of its worth. We must all, then, men of action and 
men of thought alike, study English in much the same way, and 
by the aid of the same instrumentalities — the practical man, be- 
cause he aims at a practical end ; the philosophic thinker, be- 
cause he is destitute of the means of approximating to his end by 
any higher method than the imperfect course which alone is 
open to the American scholar. 

There are circumstances which recommend the study of Eng- 
lish especially to us Americans, others which appeal equally to 
all who use the Anglican speech. Of the former, most promi- 
nent is the fact that we, in general, require a more comprehen- 
sive knowledge of our own tongue than any other people. Ex- 
cept in mere mechanical matters, and even there far more imper- 
fectly, we have adopted the principle of the division of labor to 
a more Jimited extent than any modern civilized nation. Every 
man is a dabbler, if not a master, in every knowledge. Every man 
is a divine, a statesman, a physician and a lawyer to himself, as 
well as a counsellor to his neighbors, on all the interests involved 
in the sciences appropriately belonging to those professions. We 
all read books, magazines, newspapers, all attend learned lectures, 
and too many of us, indeed, write the one, or deliver the other. 
We resemble the Margites of Homer, who IIoXX t]7ti<5raro 
i'pya, practised every art, and if, as he kolkgdZ 6 ijniarato 



Lect. l] inteodtjctoky. 13 

curvta, bungled in all, we too must fall short of universal per- 
fection, we still need, with our multifarious strivings, an encyclo- 
pedic training, a wide command over the resources of our native 
tongue, and, more or less, a knowledge of all its special nomen- 
clatures. But this very fact of the general use of the whole Eng- 
lish vocabulary among us is a dangerous cause of corruption of 
speech, against which the careful study of our language is an 
important antidote. Things much used inevitably become much 
worn, and it is one of the most curious phenomena of language, 
that words are as subject as coin to defacement and abrasion by 
brisk circulation. The majority of those who speak any tongue 
incline to speak it imperfectly ; and where all use the dialect of 
books, the vehicle of the profoundest thoughts, the loftiest im- 
ages, the most sacred emotions that the intellect, the fancy, the 
heart of man has conceived, there special precautions are neces- 
sary to prevent that medium from becoming debased and vulgar- 
ized by corruptions of form, or, at least, by association with de- 
praved beings and unworthy themes. While, therefore, I would 
open to the humble and the unschooled the freest access to all 
the rich treasures which English literature embodies, I would in- 
culcate the importance of a careful study of genuine English, 
and a conscientious scrupulosity in its accurate use, upon all who 
in any manner occupy the position of teachers or leaders of the 
American mind, upon all whose habits, whose tastes or whose 
vocations lead them to speak oftener than to hear. 

But, as I observed, there are considerations, common to the 
Englishman and the American, which powerfully recommend 
the study of our language to thinking men. One of the most 
important of these is a repetition of the argument I have just 
used, but in a more extended application. I allude to what, for 
want of any other equally appropriate epithet, I must character- 
ize by a designation much abused both by those who rally under 
it as a watchword of party and by those to whom it is a token of 
offence — I mean the conservatism of such studies. It is doubted 
by the ablest judges, whether, except in the introduction of new 
names for new things, English has made any solid improvement 
for two centuries and a half ; and few are sanguine enough to 
believe that future changes in its structure, or in its vocabulary, 
unless in the way just stated, will be changes for the better. It 



14 • ESTKODUCTOKY. [Lect. i. 

is obvious, too, that, in proportion as new grammatical forms and 
new designations for familiar things and thoughts are introduced, 
older ones must grow obsolete ; and, of course, the existing, and 
especially the earlier, literature of England will become gradually- 
less intelligible. The importance of a permanent literature, of 
authoritative standards of expression, and, especially, of those 
great, lasting works of the imagination and the intellect, which, 
in all highly-cultivated nations, constitute the " volumes para- 
mount " of their literature, has been too generally appreciated to 
require here argument or illustration. Suffice it to say, they are 
among the most potent agencies in the cultivation of the national 
mind and heart, the strongest bond of union in a homogeneous 
people, the surest holding-ground against the shifting currents, 
the ebb and flow, of opinion and of taste. 

The Anglo-Saxon race is fortunate in possessing more such 
volumes paramount than any other modern people. The Greeks 
had their moral and sententious Hesiod ; their great tragic trio ; 
their comic Aristophanes and Menander ; and, above all, their 
epic Homer, whose story and whose speech were more closely 
interwoven with the very soul of the whole Hellenic people than 
was ever other secular composition with the life of man ; the Ro- 
mans had Ennius, and Terence, and Plautus, and, at last, but only 
when all was lost, Horace and Yirgil ; the Italians have Dante, 
and Petrarch, and Tasso, and Ariosto ; the Icelanders have Lax- 
dsela, the story of JSTjall, and the Chronicles of Snorro ; * and we, 
more favored than all, have Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shake- 
speare, and Milton — each, in his own field, as great as the might- 
iest that ever wielded pen in the like kind ; and, beyond these, 
we have the oracles of our faith, stamped with the self -approving 
impress of certain verity, and rendered, by English pens, in a 
form of rarer beauty than has elsewhere clothed the words of 
God in the speech of man. 

* The Icelandic sagas, though containing many short, rhythmical lays, are 
not versified, and therefore not poems in the usual sense of the word. But 
they are highly poetical in conception and treatment, and thus unite the fas- 
cination of more artificial forms of composition with the attractions of au- 
thentic history. In the civilization of the Scandinavian people, the prose saga 
occupied much the same place as the metrical epic in the life of the Greeks, 
or the heroic ballad in other modern nations, and it may therefore fairly claim 
a place in imaginative literature. 



Lect. i.] IOTKODUCTOKY. , 15 

Now, all these books have been for centuries a daily food, an 
intellectual pabulum, that actually has entered into and moulded 
the living thought and action of gifted nations ; and, in the case 
of the Anglican people, it will not be disputed that, working as 
they have, all in one direction, their great poets have been more 
powerful than any other secular influence in first making, and 
then keeping, the Englishman and the American what they are, 
what for hundreds of years they have been, what, God willing, 
for thousands they shall be, the pioneer race in the march of man 
towards the highest summits of worthy human achievement. 

The path of national literatures is like the orbit of those comets 
which long approach the central source of light and warmth, and 
long recede, but never return to the perihelion ; and the language 
of a people has ordinarily but one period of culmination. When 
genius has evolved the best thoughts of a given state of society, 
and elaborated the choicest forms of expression of which a given 
speech is capable, it has anticipated and appropriated the greatest 
results of that condition of human life ; and the subsequent lit- 
erature is but reproductive, not creative in its character, until 
some mighty, and for the time destructive, revolution has dis- 
solved and re-amalgamated the elements of language and of social 
life in new and diverse combinations. 

That the English tongue, and the men who speak it, will yet 
achieve great victories in the field of mind, great works in the 
world of sense, we have ample self-conscious assurance ; but, in 
the existing state of society, it is vain to expect that any future 
literary productions can occupy the place, or exert the deep, per- 
vading influence, of the volumes I have named. To them, there- 
fore, and to the dialect which is their medium, the instinct of 
self-preservation impels us tenaciously to cling ; and when, through 
our appetite for novelty, our incurious neglect of the beautiful 
and the great, these volumes cease to be authorities in language, 
standards of moral truth and sesthetical beauty, and inspiriters of 
thought and of action, we shall have lost the springs of national 
greatness which it most concerned us to preserve. 

We hear much, in political life, of recurrence to first princi- 
ples, and startling novelties not unfrequently win their way to 
popular acceptance under that disguise. With equal truth, and 
greater sincerity, we may say that, in language and in literature, 



16 E5TTK0DUCT0KY. [Lect. i. 

nothing can save us from ceaseless revolution but a frequent re- 
course to the primitive authorities and the recognized canons 
of highest perfection. 

In commencing the study of early English, young persons are 
not unfrequently repelled by differences of form, which seem to 
demand a considerable amount of labor to master, and the really 
trifling difficulties of our archaic dialect are magnified into insur- 
mountable obstacles. Unhappily, English scholars, themselves 
often better instructed in other tongues than in their own, have 
very frequently sanctioned the mistake, and encouraged the in- 
dolence of contemporary readers, by editing modernized editions 
of good old authors, and, in thus clothing them anew, so changed 
their outward aspect, and often their essential character, that the 
parents would scarcely be able to recognize their own progeny. 
The British press has teemed with mutilated and disguised edi- 
tions, while scrupulously faithful reprints of early English works 
have, until lately, not been often attempted, or ever well encour- 
aged. As a general rule, in the printing of old manuscripts, and in 
the republication of works which genius and time have sealed with 
the stamp of authority, no change whatever, except the correction 
of obvious clerical or typographical errors, should be tolerated ; and 
even this should be ventured on only with extreme caution, be- 
cause it often turns out that what is hastily assumed to have been 
a misspelling or a misprint, is, in fact, a form deliberately adopted 
by a writer better able to judge what was the true orthography 
for the time, than any later scholar can be. 

The rule of Coleridge has nowhere a juster application than 
here : That, when we meet an apparent error in a good author, 
we are to presume ourselves ( ignorant of his understanding, un- 
til we are certain that we understand his ignorance.' The num- 
ber of scholars who are so thoroughly possessed of the English of 
the sixteenth, not to mention earlier centuries, as to be safely in- 
trusted with the correction of authors of that period, is exceed- 
ingly small, and I doubt whether it would be possible to cite a 
single instance where this has been attempted, without grievous 
error, while, in most cases, the book has been not merely lessened 
in value, but rendered worse than useless for all the purposes of 
philology and true literature. 

But for the unfortunate readiness with which editors and pub- 



Lect. I.] ESTTKODUCTORY. 17 

lishers have yielded to the popular demand for conformity to the 
spelling and the vocabulary of the day, the knowledge of genuine 
English would now be both more general and further advanced 
than it is. The habit of reading books as they were written 
would have kept up the comprehension, if not the use, of good 
old forms and choice words which have irrecoverably perished, 
and the English of the most vigorous period of our literature 
would not now be sneered at as obsolete and unintelligible. 

After all, the difficulties of acquiring a familiar acquaintance 
with the dialect of the reign of Edward III. are extremely small. 
Let not the student be discouraged by an antiquated orthography,* 
or now and then a forgotten word, and a month's study will en- 
able him to read, with entire readiness and pleasure, all that the 
genius of England has produced during the five centuries that 
have elapsed since English literature can be said to have had a 
being. 

I camiot, of course, here dilate upon the value of a familiarity 
with the earlier English writers, but I may, perhaps, be indulged 
in a momentary reference to the greatest of them, the perusal of 
whose works alone would much more than compensate the little 
labor required to understand the dialect in which they are writ- 
ten. Neither the prose nor the verse of the English literature of 
the fourteenth century comes up to the elaborate elegance and 
the classic finish of Boccaccio and of Petrarch. But in original 
power, and in all the highest qualities of poetry, no Continental 
writer of that period, with the single exception of Dante, can for 
a moment be compared with Chaucer, who, only less than Shake- 
speare, deserves the epithet, " myriad-minded," so happily applied 
by Coleridge to the great dramatist. He is eminently the creator 

* The irregularity of the spelling in early English books is very frequently 
chargeable almost wholly to the printer. The original manuscript of the Or- 
mulum is nearly as uniform in its orthography as the most systematic modern 
writers, and some of the codices on which Pauli's edition of Gower is founded 
are described as scarcely less consistent in their spelling. — See post, Lectures 
xx. and xxi. 

I must protest against the lengths to which German philologists have some- 
times gone in the restoration, or rather reconstruction, of old writings. Some 
authors have been so diguised in this way that they would not be able to read, 
or even recognize, a line of their own works clothed in the orthography which 
modern scholars know they never used, but think they ought to have adopted. 



18 INTRODUCTORY. [Lect. I. 

of our literary dialect, the introducer, if not the inventor, of some 
of our finest poetical forms, and so essential were his labors in the 
founding of our national literature, that, without Chaucer, the 
seventeenth century could have produced no Milton, the nine- 
teenth no Keats.* It is from defect of knowledge alone, that 
his diction and his versification have been condemned as rude 
and unpolished. There are, indeed, some difficulties in his pros- 
ody which have not yet been fully solved ; but these will doubt- 
less chiefly yield to a more critical revision of the text, and even 
with the corrupt reading of the old printed editions, the general 
flow of his verse is scarcely inferior to the melody of Spenser. 
There can be little doubt that his metrical system was in perfect 
accordance with the orthoepy of his age, and it was near two centu- 
ries before any improvements were made upon his diction or his 
numbers. 

I remarked that there are circumstances in the position and the 
external relations of the English language, which recommend its 
earnest study and cultivation. I refer, of course, to the com- 
manding political influence, the wide-spread territory, and the 
commercial importance of the two great mother-countries whose 
vernacular it is. Although England is no longer at the head of 
the European political system, yet she is still the leading influence 
in the sphere of commerce, of industry, of progressive civiliza- 
tion, and of enlightened Christian philanthropy. 

The British capital is at the geographical centre of the terres- 
trious portion of the globe, and while other great cities represent 

* I must here, once for all, make the sad concession that many of Chaucer's 
works are disfigured, stained, polluted, by a grossness of thought and of lan- 
guage which strangely and painfully contrasts with the delicacy, refinement, 
and moral elevation of his other productions. The only apology, or rather 
palliation of this offence, is that which serves to excuse similar transgressions 
in Shakespeare ; namely, that the thoughts, the images, the words, are such 
as belong to the character presented, or for the time assumed, by the poet ; 
and we must remember that the moral and religious degradation of the four- 
teenth was far deeper and more pervading than that of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries. 

In speaking of the relations of Chaucer to the author of Paradise Lost, I, of 
course, refer to language only, and especially to the diction of the minor poems 
of Milton, which are as important in any just view of his poetical character as 
his great epic itself. Keats, both in verbal form and in the higher qualities of 
poetry, is constantly reminding us of the more imaginative works of Chaucer. 



Lect. i.] INTEODTICTOEY. 19 

individual nationalities, or restricted and temporary aims, the 
lasting cardinal interests of universal humanity have their bright- 
est point of radiation in the city of London. 

The language of England is spoken by greater numbers than 
any other Christian speech, and it is remarkable that, while some 
contemporaneous dialects and races are decaying and gradually 
disappearing from their natal soil, the English speech and the de- 
scendants of those who first employed it are making hourly con- 
quests of new territory, and have already established their posts 
within hailing distance throughout the circuit of the habitable 
globe. The English language is the special organ of all the great, 
world-wide charities which so honorably distinguish the present 
from all preceding ages. With little of the speculative universal 
philanthropy which has been so loudly preached and so little 
practised elsewhere, the English people have been foremost in 
every scheme of active benevolence, and they have been worthily 
seconded by their American brethren. The English Bible has 
been scattered by hundreds of millions over the face of the earth, 
and English-speaking missionaries have planted their maternal 
dialect at scores of important points, to which, had not their cour- 
ageous and self -devoting energy paved the way, not even the en- 
terprise of trade could have opened a path. Hence, English is 
emphatically the language of commerce, of civilization, of social 
and religious freedom, of progressive intelligence, and of active 
catholic philanthropy ; and, therefore, beyond any tongue ever 
used by man, it is of right the cosmopolite speech. 

That it will ever become, as some dream, literally universal in 
its empire, I am indeed far from believing ; nor do I suppose 
that the period will ever arrive, when our many-sided humamty 
will content itself with a single tongue. In the incessant change 
which all language necessarily undergoes, English itself will have 
ceased to exist, in a form identifiable with its present character, 
long before even the half of the human family can be so far har- 
monized and assimilated as to employ one common medium of 
intercourse. Languages adhere so tenaciously to their native 
soil, that, in general, they can be eradicated only by the extirpa- 
tion of the races that speak them. To take a striking instance : 
the Celtic has less vitality, less power of resistance, than any 
other speech accessible to philological research. In its whole 



20 INTRODUCTORY. [Lect. i. 

known history it has made no conquests, and it has been ever in 
a waning condition, and yet, comparatively feeble as is its self- 
sustaining power, two thousand years of Koman and Teutonic 
triumphs have not stifled its accents in Britain or in Gaul. It 
has died only with its dying race, and centuries may yet elapse 
before English shall be the sole speech of England itself. 

In like manner, not to notice other sporadic ancient dialects, 
the primitive language of Spain, after a struggle of two and 
twenty centuries with Phoenicians, and Celts, and Carthaginians, 
and Romans, and Goths, and Arabs, is still the daily speech of 
half a million of people. If, then, such be the persistence of 
language, how can we look forward to a period when English 
shall have vanquished and superseded the Chinese and the Tar- 
tar dialects, the many tongues of polyglot India, the yet surviving 
Semitic speeches in their wide diffusion, and the numerous and 
powerful Indo-European languages, which are even now disputing 
with it the mastery % In short, the prospect of the final triumph 
of any one tongue is as distant, as improbable, I may add as un- 
desirable, as the subjection of universal man to one monarchy, or 
the conformity of his multitudinous races to one standard of 
color, one physical type. The Author of our being has implanted 
in us our discrepant tendencies, for wise purposes, and they are, 
indeed, a part of the law of life itself. Diversity of growth is a 
condition of organic existence, and so long as man possesses pow- 
ers of spontaneous development and of action, so long as he is 
more and better than a machine, so long he will continue to mani- 
fest outward and inward differences, unlikeness of form, antago- 
nisms of opinion, and varieties of speech. But, though English 
will not supersede, still less extirpate, the thousand languages 
now spoken, it is not unreasonable to expect for it a wider diffu- 
sion, a more commanding influence, a more universally acknowl- 
edged beneficent action, than has yet been reached, or can here- 
after be acquired, by any ancient or now existent tongue ; and 
we may hope that the great names which adorn it will enjoy a 
wider and more durable renown than any others of the sons of men. 

These brief remarks do but hint the importance of the studies 
I am advocating, and it will be the leading object of my future 
discourses more fully to expound their claims, and to point out 
the best method of pursuing them. 



Lect. i.] INTRODUCTORY. 21 

A series of lessons upon the technicalities of English philology 
would, it is thought, be premature ; and, moreover, adequate time 
and means for the execution of an undertaking, involving so vast 
an amount of toil, have not yet been given. That must be the 
work, if not of another laborer, at least of other years, and our 
present readings must be regarded only as a collection of miscel- 
laneous observations upon the principles of articulate language, 
as exemplified in the phonology, vocabulary, and syntax of Eng- 
lish ; or, in other words, as a course preparatory to a course of 
lectures on the English tongue. Such as I describe the course, 
too, I shall endeavor to make each individual lecture — namely, a 
somewhat informal presentation of some one or more philological 
laws or general facts, in their connection with the essential char- 
acter or historical fortunes of our own speech. 

The lectures are, under the circumstances, essentially an ex- 
periment, the character and tastes of the small audiences I am 
encouraged to expect, uncertain ; but the necessities of the case 
have decided the character of the series for me, and, as in many 
other instances where external conditions control our action, in a 
way which my own judgment would probably have approved. 

The preparation of a series of thoroughly scientific discourses 
upon the English tongue, within the time and with the means at 
my command, was impossible ; and I have therefore adopted the 
plan described, as the only practicable course, and, not improba- 
bly, also the best. This point being disposed of, there remains 
only the embarrassment arising from the uncertainty as to the 
amount of philological attainment generally possessed by my au- 
dience. I have thought myself authorized to presume that, how- 
ever small in number, it would embrace persons somewhat widely 
separated in degree of culture, and as I desire to make my dis- 
courses, so far as it lies in my power, acceptable, if not instruct- 
ive, to all, I shall ask the scholar sometimes to pardon familiar, 
even trite, statements of principle, illustrations which can scarcely 
claim to be otherwise than trivial, and repetitions which clear- 
ness and strength of impression may render necessary for some, 
while I shall hope the less advanced will excuse me when I in- 
dulge in speculations designed for those to whom long study has 
rendered recondite doctrine more intelligible. In the main, I 
shall address you as persons of liberal culture, prepared, by gen- 



22 INTRODUCTORY. [Lect. i. 

eral philological education, to comprehend linguistic illustrations 
drawn from all not widely remote and unfamiliar sources, but 
who, from unexcited curiosity or the superior attractions and 
supposed claims of other knowledges, have not made the English 
language a matter of particular study, thought, or observation ; 
and such I shall hope to convince that the subject is possessed of 
sufficient worth and sufficient interest to deserve increased atten- 
tion as a branch of American education. 

I must here enter a protest against the fashionable American 
craze for sending young men and young women abroad after the 
completion of their academic instruction, not to cultivate Euro- 
pean literature or to study European art, but to figure in society 
by assuming to speak two or three Continental languages. At 
that age they have already lost the delicacy of ear and the flexi- 
bility of the vocal organs that make the acquisition of foreign 
tongues so easy in early childhood, and, though an adult may 
profitably study the literature of tongues not his own, in general 
the attempt to speak them only renders him ridiculous, though 
the politeness of his hearers may lead them not only to suppress 
a smile, but even to bestow a very ill-merited compliment. If 
parents are able to take their young children abroad for a suffi- 
cient time, they may then acquire a familiarity with one or more 
foreign languages which will be useful to them in later life, 
whether for literary or for social purposes ; but it must be re- 
membered that no man acquires a mastery of a foreign language, 
without losing something of his command over his native speech, 
and in very many cases it will be found that a partial knowledge 
of French, German, or Italian is purchased at a price which greatly 
exceeds its value. 



LECTUEE II. 

OEIGIN OF SPEECH AND OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 

Although, for the reasons assigned in the introductory lecture, 
the plan I propose to pursue does not conform to philosophic 
method, it will not be amiss to follow the example of more scien- 
tific speakers, by prefacing these lessons with a formal announce- 
ment of the subject to be discussed, and a definition of the terms 
of art employed in propounding it. 

The course upon which we are now about to enter has for its 
subject the English Language, the mother-tongue of most, and 
the habitual speech of all, to whom these lectures are addressed. 
It may seem that the adjective English, and the noun language, 
are so familiar to the audience, and so clearly and distinctly de- 
fined in their general use, that no inquiry into their history can 
make their meaning plainer. But our business is with words, 
and it will not be superfluous to examine into the origin and 
grounds of the signification ascribed even to terms so well under- 
stood as those which express the subject of our discourse. 

Neither the epithet nor the substantive is of indigenous growth. 
The word language is derived, through the French, from the Latin 
lingua, the tongue, a name very commonly applied to speech, 
because the tongue, from its relative bulk, its flexibility, and the 
greater power of the voluntary muscles over it, is the most con- 
spicuous, if not the most important, organ concerned in the pro- 
duction of articulate sounds. The Anglo-Saxons had several 
words for language, as gereord, geJ>eode, lyden,* reord, 

* There is a confusion between the Saxon lyden (laedenor leden), the 
Old English leden, and the national appellative Latin, a parallel to which is 
found also in modern Spanish. Lyden (laeden or leden), seems to be allied 
to the Anglo-Saxon hlyd, gehlyd, a sound, and hliid, loud, to the Danish 
L y d , the Swedish 1 j u d , and the German L a u t (noun), and 1 a u t (adjective), 

(23) 



24 LANGUAGE, ESSENTIAL CHAEACTER OF. [Lect. n. 

spell, spaec, sprsec, feodisc, tunge. Some of these can- 
not be traced back to any more radical form ; and we therefore 
cannot positively say, as we can of the corresponding words in 
most other tongues, that they are essentially of a figurative char- 
acter. L y d e n is recognizable in our modern English adjective 
loud; spaec, in speech; tunge, in tongue; Chaucer and 
other early writers use leden for language, and spell still sub- 
sists in the noun spell, a charm, in the verb to spell, and as the 
last member of gospel* 

all involving the same idea; and probably also to the Icelandic hljbS, a 
sound, a song, a trumpet ; which latter word also signifies, oddly, the absence 
of sound, namely, silence. The three Saxon forms of this word are employed 
also for Latin. Either this is a confusion of meaning arising from similarity 
of form, or 1 y d e n is a derivative of Latin, as the language par excellence, 
and so not allied to the other Gothic words above cited, unless, indeed, we 
suppose Latin itself to be derived from a root meaning an articulate sound, or 
language. In Spanish, especially in the Spanish colonies, an African or In- 
dian who has learned Spanish, and acquired enough of the arts of civili- 
zation to make him useful as a servant, is called 1 a d i n o , and Old Castilian 
was sometimes styled L a d i n o . On the other hand, Latin was used in Cate- 
lan to signify a foreign language generally. Thus in B. D'Esclot, cap. xxxv. : 
" vench denant lo rey, e agenollas a ell, e saludal en son lati," and cap. 
xxxviii. : " e cridaren molt fortement en llur lati ;" "en son lati," and " en 
Uur lati," signifying respectively, in his language, in their language, which 
in this case was Arabic. Latin was also very commonly employed in the 
same sense in old French and Italian. From this use of the word, muy 
la din o came to mean, in Spanish, a great linguist, one knowing many for- 
eign languages. The Old English latiner, by corruption latimer, an inter- 
preter or dragoman, is of similar derivation. Thus in Richard Cceur de Lion, 
Weber ii. 97: 

Anon stood up her latymer 

And aunsweryd Aleyn Trenchemer. 

* It is not clear whether the first syllable of this word is the name of the 
divinity, God, or the adjective god , good. Bosworth (under God) and many 
other etymologists, adopt the former supposition ; and this view is suj3ported 
by the analogy of the Icelandic, which has guospjall, God's icord. On the 
other hand god-spell, as a compound of the adjective god and spell 
would be the exact etymological equivalent of the Greek kvayy&iov, and the 
author of the Ormulum, who lived at a period when Anglo-Saxon was not yet 
forgotten, evidently adopts this derivation. 



And again, 



Goddspell onn Ennglissh nemmnedd iss 

God word, annd god tipennde, 

God errnde, &c. Ormulum, Preface, 157. 

Off all piss god uss brinngej> word 
Annd errnde annd god tipinnde 



LECT. n.] OKIGIN" OF SPEECH. 25 

The word language, in its most limited application, is restricted 
to human articulate speech ; but in its metaphorical use, it em- 
braces e^ery mode of communication by which facts can be made 
known, sentiments or passions expressed, or emotions excited. 
We speak not only of the audible language of words, the visi- 
ble language of written alphabetic characters or other conven- 
tional symbols whether arbitrary or imitative, of the dumb and 
indefinable language of manual signs, of facial expression and of 
gesture, but also of the language of brute-beast and bird ; and we 
apply the same designation to the promptings of the silent in- 
spiration, and to the lessons of the intelligible providence, of the 
Deity, as well as to the voice of the many-tongued operations of 
inanimate nature. Language, therefore, in its broadest sense, 
addresses itself to the human soul both by direct intuition and 
through all the material entrances of knowledge. Every organ 
may be its vehicle, every sense its recipient, and every form of 
existence a speaker. 

Many men pass through lif e without pausing to inquire wheth- 
er the power of speech, of which they make hourly use, is a 
faculty, or an art — a gift of the Creator, or a painfully-acquired 
accomplishment — a natural and universal possession, or a human 
invention for carrying on the intercommunication essential to 
social life.* We may answer this query, in a general way, by 

Goddspell, and f orr pi magg itt well 
God errnde ben gehatenn, &c. , &c. 

Ormulum, Preface, 175. 
Layamon, iii. 182, v. 29508, has 

& beode per godes godd-spel ; 

and preach there God's gospel, a phrase not likely to be employed if gospel had 
been understood to mean, of itself, God's word. 

The phrases, gadspell that guoda, the good gospel, Heliand, 1, 17, and 
spel godes, the word of God, H. 17, 13, 41, 15, 19 and 81, 8, seem to show 
that in the Continental Old-Saxon, g o d - s p e 1 1 was derived from god, God, 
and spell. Schilter adopts the same etymology for the gotspellon of 
Tatian ; gotspellota themo folke, evangelizabat populo, c. xiii. 25 ; z i 
gotspellone Gotes rihhi, evangelizare regnum Dei, c. xxii. 4, as also for 
gotspel, predigonti gotspel rihhes, praedicans evangelium regni, 
xxii. Godes spelboda, Gynewulf, Grist. , p. 336. Skeat, in his Etymologi- 
cal Dictionary (Oxford, 1882), considers the question as settled in favor of the 
derivation from god, God, and spell, story. 

* A similar question has been raised with regard to the cries of animals, 
which, for certain purposes at least, perform the office of speech. About the 
2 



26 OEIGIJS" OF SPEECH. [Lect. ii. 

saying that articulate language is the product of a faculty inher- 
ent in man, though we cannot often detect any natural and nec- 
essary connection between a particular object and the vocal sound 
by which this or that people represents it. There can be little 
doubt that a colony of children, reared without hearing words 
uttered by those around them, would at length form for them- 
selves a speech. What its character would be could only be de- 



beginning of this century, Daines Barrington, a member of the Royal Society, 
tried a series of experiments to determine how far the notes of birds were spon- 
taneous and uniform, and how far dependent on instruction and imitation. 
The result (which, however, has been questioned by later observers), was that 
though there is much difference in flexibility, power, and compass of voice in 
birds of different species, yet, in general, the note of the bird is that which he 
is taught in the nest, and with more or less felicity of imitation he adopts the 
song of his nurse, whether the maternal bird or a stranger. To what extent 
the notes of birds, of beasts, of insects, and of fish (for, in spite of the proverb, 
all fishes are not dumb), are significant, it is quite out of our power to deter- 
mine. Coleridge, tenaciously as he adheres to the essential distinction in kind 
between the faculties of the brute and the man, admits that the dog may have 
an analogon of words. (Aids, Aph. ix.) 

All will agree in denying to the lower animals the possession of language as 
a means of intellectual discourse ; but even this conclusion must rest upon 
stronger grounds than the testimony of the ear. Sounds, which to our obtuse 
organs appear identical, may be infinitely diversified to the acuter senses of 
these inferior creatures, and there is abundant evidence that they do in many 
instances communicate with each other by means, and in a degree, wholly in- 
appreciable by us. When a whale is struck, the whole shoal, though widely 
dispersed, are instantly made aware of the presence of an enemy; and when 
the gravedigger beetle finds the carcass of a mole, he hastens to communicate 
the discovery to his fellows, and soon returns with his four confederates. 
(Conscience, Boek der Natuer, vi.) 

An English friend reports to me an instance where the lawn of a gentleman 
near London was so infested with ants that he had resolved to replace the 
whole surface with fresh turf, when early one morning a cloud of birds, many 
hundreds in number, of different species, which must have been collected from 
a considerable extent of territory, swooped down upon the lawn, tore open 
the ant-hills which nearly covered it, and devoured every ant and every egg 
of the whole colony. Had these birds communicated with each other and 
appointed a rendezvous where they could make themselves so signally useful ? 

The distinction we habitually make between articulate and inarticulate 
sounds, though sufficiently warranted as applied to human utterance, may be 
unfounded with reference to voices addressed to organizations less gross ; and 
a wider acquaintance with human language often teaches us that what to the 
ear is, at first, a confused and inexpressive muttering, becomes, by some 
familiarity, an intelligible succession of significant sounds. 



Lect. n.] OEIGIN OF SPEECH. 27 

termined by the method of Psammetichus, an experiment too 
cruel to be repeated by inquirers intelligent enough to be inter- 
ested in the result. It is not improbable that a language of 
manual signs would precede articulate words, and it may be pre- 
sumed that these signs would closely resemble those so much used 
as a means of communication among savages, and which are, to 
a great extent, identical with what have been called the natural 
signs of the deaf-and-dumb. If you bring together two unedu- 
cated but intelligent deaf-mutes from different countries, they will 
at once comprehend most of each other's signs, and converse 
with freedom, while their respective speaking countrymen would 
be wholly unable to communicate at all. And it is often ob- 
served at deaf-and-dumb asylums, when visited by natives of 
Polynesia, or by American Indians,* that the pupils and the stran- 
gers very readily understand each other, nature suggesting the 
same symbols to both. Thus, the savage and the deaf-mute 

* The universality of this sign-language was beautifully illustrated at the 
Institution for the Deaf-and-Bumb, in New York, some time since, on the 
occasion of a visit made to it by a delegation of Sioux Indians. The Indians 
having been on a visit to their " Great Father " at Washington, and being on 
a sight-seeing tour through the country, paid a visit to the Deaf-and-Dumb 
Institute. " Some of the pupils were brought into the presence of the Indians, 
who sat stiff and upright on the benches, with their blankets wrapped around 
them, and all their paint on. One bright little boy was called upon to address 
them in the sign-language, which he did in a graceful and pointed manner. 
The Chief among the Indians remarked to his interpreter that he understood 
some of the signs. This being communicated to the principal, he had the boy 
illustrate by signs the manner in which hunters killed deer. This pleased the 
Indian Chief mightily, and he requested permission to explain the Indian's 
method of killing buffalo. This being granted, he sprang to his feet, threw 
aside his blanket, and in a wild and graceful manner, detailed, by means of 
signs common among the prairie tribes, a buffalo hunt — he pictured the 
mounting of steeds, the gallop across the prairie, the first view of the herd of 
buffalo, the chase, the scattering of the herd, the rapid firing of the Indians, 
the wounding of some buffaloes, the killing of others, concluding with the 
final scenes of the butchering of the animals, the taking-off of the hide, the 
packing of the meat on the horses, and the return to camp. The mute boy 
followed him eagerly through all his wild gesticulations, and when he had 
concluded, turned to his slate and wrote down the entire story told by the 
Chief. This being interpreted to the Chief, he burst into an immoderate fit of 
laughter, a most unusual thing for an Indian to do, and patting the lad patron- 
izingly on the head, devoted himself during the rest of his visit to cultivating 
his further acquaintance." 



28 SIGN-LANGUAGE. [Lect. n. 

alike express the notion of parity in general, and especially the 
fraternal relation, by joining and extending the two fore-fingers. 
The all-observing Shakespeare must have remembered this, when 
he made Fluellen say, " As like as my fingers is to my fingers."* 
In this instance, as also when the savage and the deaf-mute both 
express the speaking of truth by passing the extended index fin- 
ger directly forwards from the lips, and the utterance of false- 
hood by carrying it crookedly sidewise, there seems to be some 
natural analogy between the gesture and the thought. So the 
coincidence, by which they agree in moving the hand with a 
rapid circular or spiral motion over the top of the head to indi- 
cate a fool, though less familiar, is equally explicable ; but there 
are signs common to the savage and the deaf-mute, or at least 
mutually intelligible to them, which are apparently arbitrary, and 
without any discoverable relation to the thing signified. 

Trained as we are to a grave and unimpassioned manner, it 
is difficult for us to realize that the movements and gestures with 
which Italian vivacity accompanies its social intercourse are all 
really significant. But, though in the cultivated circles of Italy, 
and of other countries of Southern Europe, manual signs are less 
resorted to, yet telegraphic communications by hands, face, feet, 
the whole person in short, are everywhere kept up as qualifica- 
tions of animated oral discourse. A foreigner, therefore, who 
understands no language but that addressed to the ear, loses much 

* I remember that when I told a Turcoman, in reply to a question whether 
I was an Englishman, that I was an American, he expressed his notion of 
the identity of the two peoples by the same sign. 

" Your religion and ours are like that," and he laid the two fore-fingers of 
his hands one against the other. — Hue., vol. ii., chap, i., p. 39. 

Dampier, Voyages, 1703, i. 359, says: " They (the people of Mindanao) would 
always be praising the English, as declaring that the English and the Minda- 
naians were all one. This they exprest by putting their two fore-fingers close to- 
gether, and saying that the English and Mindanaians were samo, samo, that is 
all one." 

In the curious Livre des Faits de Jean Bouciquaut, P. I. c. xxv., it is stated 
that when the French knights were taken prisoners by the Turks at the bat- 
tle of Nicopolis, the Count de Nevers saved Boucicaut from execution by 
claiming him as a brother, or near friend, by the same sign : "Si l'advisa 
Dieu tout soubdainement de joindre les deux doigts ensemble de ses deux mains 
en regardant le Basat, et fit signe qu'il luy estoit comme son propre frere et 
qu'il le repitast ; lequel signe le Basat entendit tantot, et le fit laisser." 



Lect. n.] SIGN-LANGUAGE. 29 

of the point of the lively conversation around him. Among the 
lower classes in the Mediterranean countries, the use of signs, 
with or without words, is very general. If you ask an Italian 
servant, who has returned empty-handed from the Post-Office, 
whether he has letters for you, he will reply by moving his up- 
lifted fore-finger slowly backwards and forwards before his nose ; 
while a Greek, under similar circumstances, would throw back 
the head, elongate the face, roll up the eyes, and give a cluck 
with the tongue not unlike the note of a setting hen. You see 
the coachmen, servants, and others of the lower classes in Italy, 
constantly communicating by signs, sometimes, indeed, throwing 
in a word, but often expressing a whole sentence in a silent ges- 
ture ; and in conversation, especially on subjects where caution is 
necessary, a speaker will often stop in the middle of a period and 
finish his remarks in dumb pantomime. Native scholars have 
shown that the modern Italian sign-language is very closely analo- 
gous to the ancient which is so often alluded to by the classical 
writers, and its origin dates back very far into the night of time. 
In an artistic point of view a knowledge of these signs is of consid- 
erable interest, for it serves to interpret much of the action in 
the pictorial compositions of Italian masters which would be 
otherwise hardly intelligible.* Besides articulate sounds and the 

* The language of gesture is so well understood in Italy, that when King 
Ferdinand returned to Naples after the revolutionary movements of 1822, he 
made an address to the lazzaroni from the balcony of the palace, wholly by 
signs, which, in the midst of the most tumultuous shouts, were perfectly in- 
telligible to his public. He reproached, threatened, admonished, forgave, 
and finally dismissed the rabble as thoroughly persuaded and edified by the 
gesticulations of the royal Punch, as an American crowd by the eloquence of 
a Webster. The system of semeiology, if I may coin a word for the occasion, 
is even more perfected in Sicily, and it is traditionally affirmed that the famous 
conspiracy of the Sicilian Vespers was organized wholly by facial signs, not 
even the hand being employed. The general use of signs in Italy has grown, 
in a great measure, out of the fact that their swift expressiveness is often bet- 
ter suited to the rapid communication required by an impassioned people 
than the slow movement of articulate phrase. But there is another reason 
for the emploj^ment of a sign-language in the States of the Church, in Naples, 
and other despotic countries. Every man knows that he is constantly sur- 
rounded by spies, and it is therefore safer to express himself by gestures, 
whose application is unintelligible to a listener not already acquainted with 
the subject to which they refer, and which, besides, cannot be so readily re- 
corded or repeated even when understood. 



30 IMITATIVE WOKDS. [Lect. n. 

language of signs, we have another means by which we often 
involuntarily and unconsciously communicate, or rather betray, 
if not facts, at least the state of our own minds, our thoughts and 
f eelings prompted by known or supposed facts. I refer here to 
the spontaneous action of the muscles of the face, and sometimes 
of the whole frame, when we are excited by powerful emotions, 
or are specially interested in the topic of a conversation which 
we hear or participate in. That much practice may enable any 
one to control, in a great degree, this involuntary expression, is 
undoubtedly true ; but an acute observer of the human face can, 
in very many cases, read what is passing in the breast of another, 
in spite of the most strenuous efforts to conceal it. So much 
more truth-telling than words, in fact, are these self -speaking mus- 
cles to those who have studied their dialect, that it is a current adage 
that language was given us to enable us to conceal our thoughts. 

There is a familiar class of words called imitative, or, to use a 
hard term, onomatopoetic, where there is an evident connection 
between the sound and the sense. These are all, or nearly all, 
words descriptive of particular sounds, or acts accompanied by 
characteristic sounds, such as buzz, crash, gurgle, gargle, hum, 
whiz, coo, howl, bellow, roar, whistle, whine, creak, cluck, gab- 
ble ; and, in conversation, we often allow ourselves to use words 
of this class not to be found in the fullest dictionaries. Euren, 
in his Finnish Grammar, states that one-third of the verbs in Fin- 
nish are distinctly onomatopoetic. The remark of a contempo- 
rary of Dr. Johnson, that much of the effect of his conversation 
was owing to his " how-wow way," will be remembered by every 
one. A great modern English poet, following the authority of 
Sidney, has even introduced into verse a word borrowed from the 
voice of the sheep, when, speaking of certain censurable follies, 
he calls them " lading vanities." That these resemblances are in 
many instances imaginary, appears from the fact that different 
nations sometimes express the same sound by different imitative 
words. Thus, we represent the report of fire-arms by the word 
bang ! the Germans by p u f f , or p a f f ! ; and Sylvester, in his 
translation of Du Bartas published two centuries and a half since, 
uses pork, pork, instead of the modern caw, caw, as an imitation 
of the note of the raven.* 

* The French imitate the sound of a bell by drelin I drelin ! The Italians 



Lect. n.] OEIGIN OF SPEECH. 31 

There has been much ingenious and plausible speculation upon 
the natural significance of articulate words ; and it is at least es- 
tablished, that certain elementary sounds are very extensively, if 
not universally, employed to express certain primary conceptions. 
The subject has not, however, yet been prosecuted far enough to 
bring us to very precise results ; but we are probably authorized 
to say that, as a general law, there does exist, or has existed, a 
natural connection between the sound and the thing signified, and 
consequently, that the forms of language are neither arbitrary or 
conventional on the one hand, nor accidental on the other, but are 
natural and necessary products of the organization, faculties, and 
condition of man. Nay, some philologists maintain that the laws 
of the germination and growth of these forms are so constant, 
that if the structure and powers of the organs of speech, and all 
modifying outward conditions affecting the internal or external 
life of a particular race, could be precisely known, their entire 
language might be predicted and constructed beforehand, with as 
much certainty as any other result of the action of human facul- 
ties. Hence it would follow that a resemblance between particu- 
lar radicals or grammatical forms in different languages does not 
prove that one is derived from the other, or that both are histori- 
cally referable to any one original source ; but the likeness may 
be simply an instance of a similarity of effect from the operation 
of similar causes. It would therefore be conceivable that words 
identical in form, yet absolutely new, might even now spring up 
simultaneously or successively in nations between which there is 

use squilla as imitative of the sound of a trumpet and of a bell. Columbus 
found that the Indians called a hand-bell chuc, and cibcc (evidently identical 
with Glocke and clock) is the Piedmontese for bell. 

A passage, cited by Suidas from Cratinus, imitating the bleating of sheep, 
has been appealed to as a proof that the pronunciation of the modern Greeks is 
erroneous, because according to their orthoepy the syllables in question would 
be sounded not ba, ba, but ve, ve. On the other hand, it might be observed, 
that perhaps the Grecian sheep in the time of Cratinus were of breeds whose 
bleat was as distinct from that of the modern European stock, as the croaking 
of what Tassoni calls the "syrens of the ditch," in Western Europe, is from 
that of their aquatic brethren of Athens, whose song, as every observing trav- 
eller in Greece can testify, the fipeneKEKeZ kocl% noat; of the Aristophanic comedy 
so well represents. Bruno Latini, Li Tresors, p. 229, observes that the bleat of 
the black sheep is meh ! that of the white, beh ! 

Ruskin somewhere uses ringing streamlets as imitative. 



32 OKIGIN OF LANGUAGE. [Lect. n. 

no communication, and no connection but that which is implied 
in unity of species and of organization. When, then, we find in 
the language of the Tonga Islands the verb mate, to kill, we are 
not authorized to infer an affinity between that speech and the 
Spanish, which uses m at ar in the same sense, or the Latin which 
has m a c t a r e , also of the like signification. We must either re- 
fer such cases to some obscure law of universal humanity, or agree 
with Thomas Fuller, who remarks that 

" The judicious behold these as no regular congruities, but cas- 
ual coincidences, the like to which may be found in languages of 
the greatest distance, which never met together since they parted 
at the confusion of Babel ; and we may not enforce a conformity 
between the Hebrew and the English because one of the three 
giants, sons of Anak, was called A-hi-man." 

The origin of language is shrouded in the same impenetrable 
mystery that conceals the secrets of our primary mental and phys- 
ical being. We cannot say, with some, that it is of itself an or- 
ganism, but we regard it as a necessary, and therefore natural, 
product of intelligent self-conscious organization. Yet we do not 
believe that the rage of the naturalistic school of philosophy for 
detecting law and principle where our limited human faculties 
must be content to accept ultimate fact, will ever succeed in point- 
ing out the quo modo, the how, of its germination and early de- 
velopment.* We know no language in a state of formation. So 
far as observation goes, its structure is as complete among the 
most unlettered savages, and in the remotest periods, as in the 
golden age of Hellenic literature. The history of its changes we 
can but imperfectly trace ; the law of its being lies beyond our 
reach. Its contemporary mutations, even, elude us, and to most 
of our inquiries into the rationale of its forms we find no more 
satisfactory answer than that one given by the quaint author of 
the Religio Medici, in the seventh of his Miscellany Tracts, 

* I cannot help referring here to Max Miiller's " Eibbert Lectures," delivered 
in 1878, as a remarkable instance of the unsatisfactory character of specula- 
tions on this subject, coming as they do from a philologist and linguist so em- 
inent that his suggestions must always command the most respectful attention, 
even when they do not compel assent. 

See American ed. under title of Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Relig- 
ion, p. 177 et seq. 



Lect. n.] ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 33 

Why saith the Italian, Signor, si! the Spaniard, Si Sefior! 
Because the one puts that behind, the other puts before. 

But though the faculty of articulate speech may be considered 
natural to man, it differs from most other human powers, whether 
organic or incorporeal, in this : that it is a faculty belonging to 
the race, not to the individual, and that the social condition is es- 
sential, not to its cultivation only, but to its existence. Hence, its 
exercise is not spontaneous, or in any sense self-taught, as are all 
purely organic processes. Nevertheless, considered in its mode of 
action, the use of the mother-tongue may be regarded as an in- 
stinctive function, because it is acquired through the promptings 
of natural impulses, and without any conscious, calculating effort. 
We retain no recollection of the process by which we learned to 
understand and employ our maternal speech, at least as respects 
that portion of it which is mastered in infant life, and is not 
taught in the artificial form it assumes in books. In actual speak- 
ing, the movement, both physical and intellectual, is as complete- 
ly automatic and unconscious as the action of the nerves, muscles, 
and tendons by whose instrumentality the hand is raised or the 
foot thrown forward. We will the result, and it follows mechan- 
ically in both cases, so far as any conscious operation of our voli- 
tion upon the material agencies is concerned. It is, therefore, no 
abuse of words to call the mother-tongue, as the unlearned often 
do, our natural language. 

Speech, fully possessed and absolutely appropriated, is purely 
subjective ; but it becomes inorganic and foreign when we make 
it matter of objective study, observation, or conscious effort. 
Learning a foreign language, or even studiously conforming our 
own to abstract rule, is analogous to those half -intellectual, half- 
corporeal processes, by which we acquire the power of controlling 
the action of the involuntary muscles, so as to give movement to 
parts of the system ordinarily quiescent ; and speech, like bodily 
motion, is seldom graceful or free, except while its action is spon- 
taneous. The moment it betrays itself as artificial, it becomes con- 
strained, awkward, inelegant. And hence it is that the mother- 
tongue, though it may be forgotten, can never be completely 
supplanted or supplied by any other. Those who grow up speak- 
ing many languages, very seldom acquire a complete mastery 
2* 



34 MOTHEK-TONGTJE. [Lect. n. 

over any of them. They are linguistic orphans, without a mater- 
nal speech, and they use language not as an organ, but as an 
implement.* 

The origin of the appellative English, as the exclusive desig- 
nation of a tongue employed by the Saxon as well as the Anglian 
colonists of our fatherland, is not altogether clear. The etymolo- 
gy of the national names of both the principal immigrant races is 
very uncertain, but it is f amiliarly known, that for several cen- 
turies after, and not improbably before, the commencement of the 
Christian era, bands of warlike adventurers from the contermin- 
ous borders of what are now the Kingdom of Denmark and the 
German States, made frequent incursions into Britain, and at last 
established themselves as its masters. The native Celtic inhab- 
itants, who were compelled to retire before the martial prowess of 
the strangers, do not seem to have distinguished very accurately 
between the different nationalities of their conquerors. A com- 
mon name was applied by the Britons to the whole alien immi- 
gration ; and, though each tribe had its own domestic designation, 
they were, and still are, all called Saxons by the Celtic aborigines 
and their descendants. 



* It is wonderful to what extent purely conventional articulate symbols may 
be made to supply the place of a more natural language, and to serve as a 
means of very varied communication. In most of these cases, the signs agreed 
upon must be considered as standing for words, not ideas, and they are rather 
an index to speech than a language of themselves. Take the exhibitions often 
witnessed, where, when you show an object to one in the secret, a confeder- 
ate, blindfolded or in an adjoining room, will instantly name it. A method of 
communication in such cases is this. The parties agree to designate certain 
words of frequent occurrence, chiefly names of familiar objects, by numerals, 
and the table of words and their corresponding numbers is committed to mem- 
ory by both. The simple digits up to nine, including also the cipher, will rep- 
resent words which may, without exciting suspicion, be used in asking the 
name of the object. Let us suppose 1 to stand for what, 2 for is, and 3 for 
this; and further, that the number corresponding to pen-knife is 123. The 
performer, when a spectator produces a pen-knife, asks, What is this ? The 
confederate combines the corresponding numerals, one, two, three, into the 
number 123, the answer to which is pen-knife. Or again, 4, 5, and 6 may 
stand respectively for tell, me, and now, and the number 645 for pencil. A 
pencil is held up by a spectator, the conjuror cries, Now, tell me! and the an- 
swer 6, 4, 5 — 645, a pencil, is at once given. I have known this numeral 
vocabulary carried up to four thousand words, and the principle is capable of 
almost unlimited variation and extension. 



Lect. ii.] THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 35 

Popular narrative has fixed the most important of these expe- 
ditions at about the middle of the fifth century, and it is said to 
have been composed chiefly of Jutes, or Jutlanders, under the 
leadership of Hengist and Horsa,* who were afterwards joined 
by successive reinforcements from the Gothic tribes on the coast 
of the German Ocean. Among these are particularly named, 
first, the Saxon conquerors, who, at different periods, and under 
different leaders, subdued and colonized Sussex, Wessex, Essex, 
and Middlesex ; and secondly, two considerable bodies of Angles 
from Sleswick, who occupied Suffolk and Norfolk, and the south- 
western districts of Scotland. These tribes, together with Frisi- 
ans and emigrants from other neighboring Scandinavian and 
Teutonic countries, soon amalgamated, and gradually extended 
their joint sway over the whole island, except the more inaccessi- 
ble provinces of Northern and Western Britain. 

Such are the traditional accounts of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, 
as detailed by the Saxon Chronicle and other native annals, and 
they have been received without suspicion or inquiry by most 
succeeding historians. But the evidence on which these supposed 
facts rest, is of too doubtful character to command by any means 
implicit belief . The real history of this period is wrapped in the 
darkest obscurity, and we can hardly say that any thing is certain 
beyond the simple fact, that, before the close of the sixth century 
after Christ, the most important portion of Great Britain had 
been subdued, and was possessed, by Gothic tribes known to the 
indigenous populations as Saxons. There is no historical proof 
by which we can identify the Anglo-Saxon language and the peo- 
ple who spoke it, with any Continental dialect and nation ; nor, 

* The names of the two brothers, Hengist and Horsa, who are said to have 
headed the most eventful incursion of the invaders, are words in one or another 
form common to all the Scandinavian and the Teutonic dialects. Both are 
names of the genus horse, but in most localities h e n g s t is appropriated to the 
male, while in some, and particularly in Schleswig, horsa or hors is confined 
to the female animal. J. G. Kohl informs us that both the proper names are 
still current in the district from which the ancient conquerors are reported to 
have emigrated. A Danish colonel told the traveller that in a company of his 
regiment there were two privates bearing these names; and it happened, odd- 
ly, that in this case Hengist and Horsa, like Castor and Pollux, were still in- 
separably united, the places of the two soldiers being side by side in the ranks. 
Inseln u. Marschen Schlesw. -Hoist, i., 290. 



36 THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. [Lect. it. 

on the other hand, by which we can establish a diversity of origin 
or of speech between the Anglian and the Saxon colonists of 
Great Britain. But there is linguistic evidence of a great com- 
mingling of nations in the body of intruders. The Anglo-Saxon, 
in its obscure etymology, its confused and imperfect inflections, 
and its anomalous and irregular syntax, appears to me to furnish 
abundant proof of a diversity, not of a unity, of origin. It has 
not what is considered the distinctive character of a modern, so 
much as of a mixed and ill-assimilated, speech, and its relations to 
the various ingredients of which it is composed are just those of 
the present English to its own heterogeneous sources. It bor- 
rowed roots, and dropped endings, appropriated syntactical com- 
binations without the inflections which made them logical, and 
had not yet acquired a consistent and harmonious structure when 
the Norman conquest arrested its development, and imposed upon 
it, or, perhaps we should say, gave a new stimulus to, the tenden- 
cies which have resulted in the formation of modern English. 
There is no proof that Anglo-Saxon was ever spoken anywhere 
but on the soil of Great Britain ; for the Heliand, and other re- 
mains of old Saxon, are not Anglo-Saxon, and I think it must be 
regarded, not as a language which the colonists, or any of them, 
brought with them from the Continent, but as a new speech re- 
sulting from the fusion of many separate elements. It is, there- 
fore, indigenous, if not aboriginal, and as exclusively local and 
national in its character as English itself.* 

But independently of such internal evidence, it is very improb- 
able that — at a period when there existed little political, or, so far 
as we have reason to believe, linguistic unity in any considerable 
extent of maritime territory occupied by the Gothic race — any 
one branch, or any one dialect, of that race could have supplied a 
sufficient number of emigrants for so extensive conquest and occu- 
pation. The dialects of the islands and south-eastern coasts of the 
North Sea, are at this day extremely numerous and discordant,! 

* See Lecture vi. 

f The dialects referred to in the text are generally grouped under the com- 
mon denomination of Frisic or Frisian, but they vary so much both in structure 
and vocabulary, that, in many instances, they cannot be considered as having 
much direct relationship with each other. In no part of Europe are there so 
many speeches, within the same area, which are mutually unintelligible to those 



Lect. n.] THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 37 

the population very mixed and diversified in blood ; and there is 
no reason to suppose that there was less diversity of language or 
of origin among the inhabitants of those shores, at the rude and 
remote period of the conquest of Britain. To determine, there- 
fore, the relative share of different tribes and different dialects in 
the formation of the Anglo-Saxon people and the Anglo-Saxon 
speech, would be a hopeless and an unprofitable task ; but we 
may safely adopt the general conclusion, that in both the Teutonic 
element predominated over the Scandinavian.* 

who employ dialects held to be cognate. At least five principal varieties or 
patois are recognized in modern Frisic, and each of these is subdivided into 
several local jargons. A Frisic literature can scarcely be said to exist, for 
neither the ancient legal codes, nor the few modern rhymes, constitute a body 
of writings sufficiently various and comprehensive to be dignified with such an 
appellation. Accidences and partial vocabularies of several Frisic dialects have 
been compiled, but as, notwithstanding these and occasional dilettantisms in 
the way of verse, written Frisic is never employed for any practical purpose, 
the language has no orthography, and is, philologically speaking, an unwritten 
tongue. It is therefore subject to all the uncertainty and vacillation of other 
languages which exist only in the mouth of the people ; nor is there any satis- 
factory evidence to show that it was ever much more consistent and homoge- 
neous, as an independent speech, than it is at this hour. The data are too in- 
sufficient in amount, and too vague and uncritical iij character, to serve as a 
basis for speculation upon the relations between Frisic, as a whole, and other 
tongues ; and we might almost as well build arguments concerning the gram- 
matical system of the Latin upon the modern patois of Normandy, Gascony, 
and Provence ; or construct a theory of the Anglo-Saxon inflections and syn- 
tax from a comparison of Tim Bobbin's dialogues, the mercantile jargon of 
Canton, and the Talkee-talkee of the negroes of Surinam. See Lecture xviii. 
* German and Germanizing philologists appear to me to make the Frisic 
dialects too exclusively Teutonic. Take for example the argument from the 
frequent termination of the names of places in um, as Husum and others, 
which is said to be in all cases a contraction of heim. Now there are, in un- 
equivocally Scandinavian districts, local names ending in um, which in these 
instances are taken from the dative plural of the original appellation of the 
locality. Thus, in Old-Northern, Upsal was a plural, U p p s a 1 i r ; at or in 
Upsal, aoriUppsolum. In speaking of towns, we use in English most 
frequently the objective with the prepositions at or in, and in like manner in 
Old-Northern, the dative, as a or i, Husum, would occur oftener than any 
other case of the name of that town. When the inflections were dying out, as, 
in the confused mixture of races in Schleswig-Holstein and its borders, they 
did very early, the case oftenest in use would survive all others, and become 
the indeclinable name of the town, just as, in Danish and English, Holum is 
the only form for all the cases of the Icelandic Holar, the name of a place 
in northern Iceland, remarkable as having long possessed the only printing- 



38 THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. [Lect. n. 

There is, moreover, pretty satisfactory evidence that Angles 
formed some portion at least of the new population, and though 
we have no reliable direct proof of the immigration to Britain 
of any tribe that had called itself Saxon while resident on Ger- 
manic soil, yet, apart from tradition, we are authorized to infer 
such an immigration from the local names Sussex, Essex, Wes- 
sex, and Middlesex, (South Saxons, "West Saxons, East Saxons, 
and Middle Saxons ;) from the fact that all the intruders alike 
were named Saxons by the native Celts ; and from the further 
circumstance, that after the language was reduced to writing, it 
was called by those who spoke it Saxon as well as English* 

press in the island. In the case of Hilsum, the dative plural, which would 
mean at the houses, or at the milage, is a much more probable etymology than 
Hiishjem, (Haus-heim,) which would be pleonastic. These instances in 
the modern Scandinavian dialects are precisely analogous to the formation of 
Stanchio from ep rav Kw, and other similar names in modern Greek, the accu- 
sative in that language supplying the place of the dative which is obsolete. 

In Old-Northern it was very common to use the dative in naming a place, 
in constructions where the idiom of other languages would require the nomi- 
native. Thus, instead of saying, ' that estate was called Steinn/ it was more 
usual to employ the dative ; sa bserhet a Steini, that estate was called, at 
Steinn. So, J>ar er heitir i Ripum, at a place called in Bipar. In Vat- 
nsdasla Saga, k. 16, we have, a Hrutasio&um h&t J>at er Hriiti bio, it 
was called at Hrutasta&ar, where Hruti lived ; in the Saga of Finnbogi hinn 
rami, k. 3, hann bio 1> a r sem heitir at Top turn, he lived where it is 
called at Toptar ; in Magmisar go$a Saga, k. 52, b jo * * f>ar sem a StoJc- 
Jcum heitir, ma$r * * er het prdndr, there lived, where it is called at 
StokJcar, a man who hight Thrend. Athelstan to Wulfgar — quondam telluris 
particulam in loco quern solicole at Hamme vocitant. Kemble, Cod. dip. 
sev. Sax. No. 353. Haupt, vol. 12, p. 82. 

Alf. Orosius, Klipstein, Vol. I., p. 220, he gef ore of Aet-Rcethum 
" Thorpe, p. 252, he gef ore of Ha&um. 

So above, Orosius, Klipstein, to A e t - Hoe thum. 

Thorpe, to Hob dum. 

Ten Doornkaat Koolman, Wbrterbuch der Ost Friesischen SpracJie, now in 
course of publication, which, though in a scientific point of view it does not 
come up to the highest standard of German Linguistics, is nevertheless a very 
valuable contribution to the history of the Netherlandish dialects, makes much 
of the foregoing note inapplicable or superfluous. 

* Some years ago there appeared in the periodical, The Neio-Englander, 
published at New Haven, to which I cannot give a more precise reference, a 
learned article on the question discussed in the text, and the first number of 
Anglia, a German periodical, has an able essay by Grein on the same subject. 
I refer the reader to both, and, as evidence of early Continental use of Anglo- 



Lect. n.] ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 39 

How then did England become the exclusive appellation of the 
country, English of the language ? We have no evidence what- 
ever of the application of any general or collective name to the 
people, the country, or the speech, before the introduction of 
Christianity into England. The new inhabitants of the island be- 
came first known to the Roman see through Anglian captives 
who were carried to Rome in the sixth century. The name of 
their tribe, in its Latinized form, A n g 1 i, we may suppose was 
bestowed by the Romans upon the whole people, and the deriva- 
tive, Anglia, upon the territory it occupied. The Christian 
missionaries who commenced the conversion of Britain would 
naturally continue to employ the name by which the island had 
become known anew to them ; and their converts, especially if 
no general name had been already adopted, would assume that 
which their teachers brought with them. This, in the absence of 
any satisfactory proof that the Angles were a particularly numer- 
ous or powerful element in the population, appears the most 
probable reason that can now be assigned, why a people, who, in 
large proportion, retained for themselves and their several prov- 
inces the appellation of Saxon, and who were known to neigh- 
boring nations by no other name, should have surrendered this 
hereditary designation, and given to their language the name of 
English, to their country that of England, or the land of the 
Angles. 

The language itself, in the earliest existing remains of the na- 
tive literature whether composed in Latin or in the vernacular, is 
generally called English, but sometimes Saxon. These remains 
are all of later date than the adoption of Christianity by the Eng- 
lish people, and, of course, however prevalent the use of Eng- 
lish as a national appellative may be in them, nothing can be 
thence inferred as to the extent to which the term was applied 
at earlier periods. The compound term, Anglo-Saxon, first oc- 
curs in the life of Alfred, ascribed to his contemporary, Asser, 
who calls that prince Angul-Saxonum Rex, king of the 



Saxon as a designation of the English people and their speech, I cite Warna- 
frid (8th century), De Gestis Langobardorum, Lib. v. cap. 37, also, Lib. vi. 
cap. 15 ; Widukind (10th century), § 9, p. 8. See Bede. 



4:0 ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. [Lect. n. 

Anglo-Saxons. The employment of the word as a designation 
of the language and literature is much more recent.* 

The Anglo-Saxon language, though somewhat modified by 
Scandinavian influence, differs too widely from the Old-North- 
ern or Icelandic, (which I use as synonymous terms,) to afford 
any countenance to the supposition that either of them is derived 
from the other. Nor is there any good reason for rejecting the 
term Anglo-Saxon, and, as has been proposed, employing Eng- 
lish as the name of the language from the earliest date to the 
present day. A change of nomenclature like this would expose 
us to the inconvenience, not merely of embracing within one 
designation objects which have been conventionally separated, 
but of confounding things logically distinct ; for though our 
modern English is built upon and mainly derived from the An- 
glo-Saxon, the two dialects are now so discrepant, that the full- 
est knowledge of one would not alone suffice to render the other 
intelligible to either the eye or the ear. They are too unlike in 
vocabulary and in inflectional character to be still considered as 
one speech, though in syntactical structure they resemble each 
other more closely than almost any other pair of related ancient 
and modern tongues. But even in this respect, the accordance 
is not so strict as some writers conceive it to be. Sir Thomas 
Browne, for instance, in the eighth of his Miscellany Tracts, has, 
by a compendious process, established very nearly an absolute 
identity between the two. Taking, or, more probably, compos- 
ing a page or two of English, from which all words of Latin or 
French origin are excluded, he has turned, or, to use a German- 
ism here not inappropriate, overset it into Anglo-Saxon, by look- 
ing out the corresponding terms in a Saxon Dictionary, and ar- 
ranging them word for word as in English, with scarcely any 

* The pretended formal imposition of the name of England upon the An- 
glo-Saxon possessions in Great Britain, by a decree of King Egbert, is unsup- 
ported by any contemporaneous or credible testimony. It is rejected as fabu- 
lous by most historical investigators, and it is certainly very improbable that a 
king, himself a Saxon by birth and name, ruling Saxon subjects and Saxon 
provinces, should have voluntarily chosen for his realm a designation bor- 
rowed from another people and another territory. The title of Angliae or 
Anglorum rex is much more naturally explained by the supposition that 
England and English had been already adopted as the collective names of the 
country and its inhabitants. 



Lect. n.] ENOCHS IN ENGLISH. 41 

attention to grammatical form, and has thus manufactured a dia- 
lect bearing no greater relation to Anglo-Saxon than do the maca- 
ronic compositions of the sixteenth century to classical Latin. 

In the want of more extensive means than the press has jet 
made accessible for the study of the dialects of the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries — the transition period — we cannot assign any 
precise date to the change from Anglo-Saxon to English ; nor, 
indeed, is there any reason to suppose that any such sudden revo- 
lution occurred in the Anglican speech as to render it hereafter 
possible to make any thing more than an approximative and some- 
what arbitrary determination of the period. For the purposes of 
an introductory course no nice distinctions on this point are nec- 
essary, and it will suffice to say that the dialect of the period be- 
tween the middle of the twelfth and the middle of the thirteenth 
centuries partakes so strongly of the characteristics of both An- 
glo-Saxon and English, that it has been usually, and not inappro- 
priately, called Semi-Saxon. 

It is a matter of still greater difficulty to refer the subsequent 
history of English to fixed chronological epochs. The name Old- 
English has been applied to the language as spoken from the lat- 
ter date to the end of the reign of Edward III. in 1377 ; that of 
Middle-English to the form of speech extending from the close 
of Edward's reign to the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, while 
all its subsequent phases are embraced under the common designa- 
tion of Modern-English. This is, in many respects, an objection- 
able division of our philological history. The Olcl-English era 
would include many of the works of Chaucer, which belong prop- 
erly to a later stage of our literature, and at the same time ex- 
clude the English Bible of Wychffe and his fellow-laborers, 
whose style is more archaic than that of Chaucer. Middle- 
English would embrace the Confessio Amantis of Gower, who, 
philologically, is older than Chaucer, and the entire works of 
Hooker, as well as many of the plays of Shakespeare, both of 
whom belong unequivocally to the Modern-English 'period. It 
would, I think, be more accurate to commence the second era 
about the year 1350, and to terminate it with the third quarter 
of the sixteenth century. 

The first marked and specific change in the English language 
took place in the time and, in a very considerable degree, by the 



42 EPOCHS IN ENGLISH. [Lect. n. 

influence of Wycliffe, dower, and Chancer, the period of whose 
lives extended throngh the last three quarters of the fourteenth 
century, and included the brilliant reign of Edward III., and the 
glorious history of the Black Prince. The works of "Wycliffe and 
his school, including their translations of the Bible, which are 
known to have been widely circulated, undoubtedly exerted a very 
important influence on the prose, and especially on the spoken 
dialect. " The moral Grower," as Chaucer calls him, was inferior 
in ability to his two great contemporaries, and his literary influ- 
ence less marked ; but his contributions to the improvement of 
his native tongue are of some importance ; and if it is true, as 
Fuller quaintly remarks, that he " left English very bad," it is 
also true, as Fuller further observes, that he found it " very, very 
bad." The great poetical merit of Chaucer, the popular charac- 
ter of his subjects, and his own high social position, gave him an 
ascendency in the rising literature of England that scarcely any 
subsequent writer has attained ; and there is perhaps no English 
author who has done more to mould, or rather to fix, the standard 
of the language, and to develop its poetical capabilities, than this 
great genius.* From this period to the introduction of printing 
by Caxton, and the consequent diffusion of classical literature in 
England about the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the 
sixteenth century, the language remained nearly stationary ; but 
at that period a revolution commenced, which was promoted by 
the Reformation, and for a hundred years English was in a state 
of transition. At the close of the period to which I have proposed 
to apply the name Middle-English, or about the year 1575, that 
revolution had produced its first great and most striking effect 
upon the structure and vocabulary of our tongue, and thus ren- 
dered possible the composition of such writings as those of the 
great theologian and the great dramatist, which signalized the 
commencement of the last and greatest era of our literature. 
English now became fixed in grammar and vocabulary, so far as 
a thing essentially so fleeting as speech can ever be said to be 
fixed, and for nearly three centuries it has undergone no very im- 
portant change. Our orthography has* indeed .become more uni- 
form, and our stock of words has been much enlarged, but he 

* See Lectures i., v., vi., and vii. 



Lect. n.] PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS. 43 

that is well read in Spenser, Hooker, and Shakespeare, not to 
speak of other great hnninaries of that age, and above all, of the 
standard translation of the Bible (which, however, appropriately 
belongs to an earlier period), will donbt whether it has gained 
much in power to expand the intellect or touch the heart.* 

Besides the words which express the general subject of the 
present course, I must here notice certain other terms of art, and 
apologize for an occasional looseness in the use of them, which the 
poverty of the English grammatical nomenclature renders almost 
unavoidable. Our word language has no conjugate adjective, 
and for want of a native term, English scholars have long em- 
ployed the Greek derivative, philological, in a corresponding 
sense. But philology and its derivative adjective have acquired, 
in the vocabulary of Continental science, a different meaning 
from that which we give them, more comprehensive in one direc- 
tion, more limited in another, and, to supply the want which a 
restriction of their earlier sense has created, linguistic or linguis- 
tics, a term Latin in its radical, Greek in its form, has been intro- 
duced. Philology was originally applied in Germany to the 
study of the classical languages and literature of Greece and 
Rome, as a means of general intellectual culture. In its present 
use, it is defined as a " historical science, whose end is the knowl- 
edge of the intellectual condition, labors, and products of a nation, 
or of cognate nations, at particular epochs of general chronology, 
with reference to the historical development of such nations." f 
There are, then, not one, namely a Greek and Roman, but many 
philologies, as many, indeed, as there are distinct peoples, or fam- 

* "I take this present period of our English tung to be the verie height 
thereof, bycause I find it so excellently well fined both for the bodie of the 
tung itself, and for the custoniarie writing thereof, as either foren workman- 
ship can giue it glosse, or as home-wrought hanling can giue it grace. When 
the age of our people which now vse the tung so well, is dead and departed, 
there will another succede, and with the people the tung will alter and change ; 
which change in the full haruest thereof maie prove comparable to this, but 
sure for this which we now vse, it seemeth euen now to be at the best for sub- 
stance, and the brauest for circumstance, and whatsoever shall become of the 
English state, the English tung cannot prove fairer than it is at this daie, if it 
maie please our learned sort so to esteme of it, and to bestow their trauell upon 
such a subject."— Mulcaster, First Part of the Elementarie, p. 159. A. D. 
1582. 

f Heyse : Sprachwissenschaft, ff. 17. 



44 PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS. [Lect. n. 

ilies of peoples, whose intellectual characters and action may be 
known through their languages. In philology thus considered, 
the study of languages is a means to the end specified in the 
definition just given. In linguistics, on the other hand, language 
itself, as one of the great characteristics of humanity, is the end, 
and the means are the study of general and comparative gram- 
mar. Every philology is the physiology of a species in language ; 
linguistics, the comparative anatomy of all the several systems of 
articulate communication between man and man. Linguistics, as 
a noun, has hardly become an English word. Philology, as used 
by most English and American writers, embraces the signification 
of the two words by which, in Continental literature, the study of 
language is characterized, according to the methods by which, 
and the objects for which, it is pursued. The adjectives, philo- 
logical and linguistic, are employed sometimes interchangeably 
in the same sense as philology, and sometimes as adjectives con- 
jugate in meaning to the noun language. I shall not attempt, in 
this course, a strict conformity to Continental usage in the em- 
ployment of these words, nor, indeed, would it be practicable to 
do so, until a new adjective shall be coined to relieve one of them 
of its double meaning ; but I shall endeavor so to use them all, 
that the context or the subject matter will determine the sense 
which they are intended to bear for the occasion.* 

From the distinction here pointed out, it results that philology 
concerns itself chiefly with that which is peculiar to a given 
speech and its literature, linguistics with those laws and proper- 
ties which are common to all languages. Philology is conversant 
with distinctions ; linguistics with analogies. The course of lec- 
tures I am commencing is intended to be strictly philological, and 
I shall introduce illustrations from the field of linguistics only 
when they are necessary for etymological reasons, or to make the 
distinguishing traits of English more palpable by the force of 
contrast. 

* Our English grammatical and philological vocabulary is poor. We have 
no adjective strictly conjugate to speech, tongue, language, verb, noun, and 
many other terms of art in this department. Linguistic is a barbarous hybrid, 
and, in our use, equivocal, as are also the adjectives verbal, nominal, and the 
like. A native equivalent to the sprachlich of some German writers, cor- 
responding nearly to our old use of philological, as in the phrase, sprachliche 
Forschungen, where the adjective embraces the meaning both of philolog- 
ical and linguistic, is much wanted. 



LECTUEE III. 

PRACTICAL USES OF ETYMOLOGY. 

In the last lecture, the distinction made in recent grammatical 
nomenclature between philology and linguistics was illustrated by 
comparing the former to the physiology of a single species, the 
latter to the comparative anatomy of different species. Etymolo- 
gy, or the study of the primitive, derivative, and figurative forms 
and meanings of words, must of course have different uses, ac- 
cording to the object for which it is pursued. If the aims of the 
etymological inquirer are philological, and he seeks only a more 
thorough comprehension and mastery of the vocabulary of his 
own tongue, the uses in question, though not excluding other col- 
lateral advantages, may be said to be of a strictly practical charac- 
ter ; or, in other words, etymology, so studied, tends directly to 
aid us in the clear understanding and just and forcible employ- 
ment of the words which compose our own language.* If, on 
the other hand, the scholar's objects are ethnological or linguistic, 
and he investigates the history of words for the purpose of tracing 
the relations between different races or different languages, and of 
arriving at those general principles of universal grammar which 

* Etymological studies for this purpose do not yield equally valuable fruits 
in all languages. I would instance modern Greek. Yery many curious and 
instructive facts referring to the development and growth of Mediaeval and 
Modern Greek will be found in Sophocles's learned Glossary of Later and By- 
zantine Greek. Cambridge, Mass., 1860, quarto. See Preface to the Glossary, 
pp. 131-2-3 ; also App. to Glossary, p. 581. 

We commend this work of Sophocles to the attention of English Philhel- 
lenes who, with certain distinguished British scholars, believe in the identity of 
Modern and Classic Greek, and who advise the acquisition of a practical mas- 
tery of the modern speech as the best means of becoming thoroughly familiar 
with the letter and spirit of the ancient tongue. I cannot here assign my rea- 
sons at length, but I must express my total dissent from this opinion. 

(45) 



46 PHILOLOGICAL STUDIES. [Lect. in. 

determine the form and structure of all human speech, his studies 
are indeed more highly scientific in their scope and method, but they 
aid him little in the comprehension, and, as experience abundant- 
ly shows, scarcely at all in the use, of his maternal tongue. But 
though I admit that philology is of a less rigorously scientific char- 
acter than linguistics, I by no means concede to the latter any 
pre-eminence as a philosophic study, or as requiring higher intel- 
lectual endowments for its successful cultivation ; and it cannot be 
disputed that, as a means of ethical culture, philology, connecting 
itself as it does with the whole mental and physical life of man, 
illustrating as well the inward thought and f eeling as the outward 
action of a nation, has almost as great a superiority over linguistics 
as has history over pure mathematics. Philological studies, when 
philology, as explained in the last lecture, was restricted to the 
cultivation of the languages, literature, history, and archseology of 
Greece and Rome, were very commonly called literse human- 
i o r e s , or, in English, the humanities / and it is the conviction 
of their value as a moral and intellectual discipline, which has led 
scholars almost universally to ascribe the origin of this appellation 
to a sense of their refining, elevating, and humanizing influence. 
This, however, I think, is an erroneous etymology.* They were 
called literse humaniores, the humanities, by way of oppo- 
sition to the liters divinse, or divinity, the two studies, phi- 
lology and theology, then completing the circle of scholastic 
knowledge, which, at the period of the introduction of the 
phrase, scarcely included any branch of physical science. But 
though the etymology is mistaken, its general reception is an evi- 
dence of the opinion of the learned as to the worth and import- 
ance of the study, and, now that so many modern literatures have 
attained to an excellence scarcely inferior to that of classic models, 

* I am not here controverting the opinion of Aulus Gellius and other ancient 
critics concerning the etymology and signification of the term Uteres humanm 
or humaniores. They were quite right as to the origin and force of the ex- 
pression as understood and used by themselves and their contemporaries. But 
in the classic ages theological literature had, properly speaking, no existence ; 
and when in succeeding centuries there sprang up a body of distinctly Chris- 
tian literature, it became necessary to discriminate between it and the works of 
heathen authors, and the term Uteres olivines was applied to theological writings, 
while profane compositions were called Uteres humanm or humaniores with lit- 
tle attention to the original significance of the expression. 



Lect. in.] USES OF ETYMOLOGY. 47 

their special philologies have even stronger claims upon lis than 
those of ancient lore, because they are not only almost equally 
valuable as instruments of mental culture, but are more directly 
connected with the clear intelligence and fit discharge of our high- 
est moral, social, and religious duties. 

Etymology is a fundamental branch of all philological and all 
linguistic study. The word is used in two senses, or rather, the 
science of etymology has two offices. The one concerns itself 
with the primitive and derivative forms and significations of 
words, the other with their grammatical inflections and modifica- 
tions ; the one considers words independently and absolutely, the 
other in their syntactical relations. In discussing the uses of ety- 
mology, I shall confine myself to the first of these offices, or that 
which consists in investigating the earliest recognizable shape and 
meaning of words, and in tracing the history of their subsequent 
changes in form and signification. A knowledge of etymology, 
to such an extent as is required for all the general purposes of lit- 
erature and of lif e, is attainable by aids within the reach of every 
man of moderate scholastic training. Our commonest dictionaries 
give, with tolerable accuracy, the etymologies of most of our 
vocabulary, and where these fail, every library will furnish the 
means of further investigation. It must be confessed, however, 
that no English dictionary at all fulfils the requisites either of a 
truly scientific or of a popular etymologicon. They all attempt 
too much and too little — too much of comparative, too little of 
positive etymology. Of course, in a complete thesaurus of any 
language, the etymology of every word should exhibit both its 
philology and its linguistics, its domestic history, and its foreign 
relations, but in a hand-lexicon of any modern tongue, this wide 
range of linguistic research is misplaced, because it necessarily ex- 
cludes much that is of more immediate importance to the under- 
standing and the use of the vocabulary. Kichardson's, which, 
however, is faulty in arrangement and too bulky for convenient 
use as a manual, best answers the true idea of an English dic- 
tionary, because it follows, more closely than any other, the his- 
tory of the words it defines. For the purposes of general use, no 
foreign roots should be introduced into the etymological part of a 
dictionary, barely because they resemble, and are presumably cog- 
nate with, words of our own language. The selection of such 



48 EXTRAVAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. [Lect. m. 

should be limited to those from which the English word is known 
to be derived, and such others as, by their form or their meaning, 
serve more clearly to explain either its orthography or some of its 
significations. "Whatever is beyond this belongs to the domain of 
linguistics, comparative grammar, ethnology, to a thesaurus, not a 
dictionary, and it can find room in this latter only by excluding 
what, for the purposes of a dictionary, is of greater value.* 

I have already assigned what seemed to me sufficient reasons 
for making the present course philological, not linguistic ; and 
I cannot, without occupying time more appropriately employed 
otherwise, enter into a discussion of the aims and importance of 
linguistic studies in their bearing upon etymology, still less in 
their relation to the great questions connected with the unity of 
the species and the general laws of intellectual action — the highest 
problems which unaided humanity can aspire to solve. I freely 
allow their profound interest and their strict scientific character, 
but they must, for the present, be the special property of the few, 
not, like the mother-tongue, the common heritage of the many ; 
and I now again refer to them only to protest against the in- 
ference that I deny or depreciate their worth because I think it 
necessary, in a preparatory course, to exclude them from consider- 
ation. 

The extravagance of etymologists has brought the whole study 
of words into popular discredit ; and though that study is now 
pursued in much stricter accordance with philosophic method, in- 
stances of wild conjecture and absurd speculation are still by no 
means wanting. Menage, formerly often, and now sometimes, 
cited as an authority in French etymology, and of course with re- 
spect to the origin of English words borrowed from the French, 
is among the boldest of these inquirers. He does not hesitate to 
assign any foreign primitive, no matter how distant the source, as 
the origin of the French word resembling it ; and when none such 
offers, he coins a Low-Latin root for the occasion. f In such cases, 

* The Etymological Dictionaky op the English Language, by the 
Rev. W. W. Skeat, Oxford, 1882, is far superior to any former work of the 
sort, and is, in fact, with few exceptions, as nearly satisfactory as anything 
that can be hoped for until our knowledge of the actual history of our own 
vocabulary shall be much further advanced than it is at present. 

f For instance see fab a, fabarius, fdbaricus, fdbaricotus, faricotus, Tiarico- 
tus; — transverbus, transversicus, transversicotus, transicotus, tracotus, 



Lect. in.] EXTRAVAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. 49 

the detection of the falsehood is difficult, its refutation next to 
impossible, for in the chaos of monkish and secular writers in that 
corrupted dialect, who can say what barbarisms may not occur % 
Menage is not the only etymologist who has sinned in this way, 
for it is one of the safest and easiest of literary frauds. Dr. John- 
son thought we were not authorized to deny that there might be 
witches, because nothing proved their non-existence; and the 
same principle may compel us to pause in disputing a plausible 
etymology, for want of evidence to show that the supposed root 
does or does not actually exist in a given vocabulary. The wise 
old Fuller, of whom no lover of wit, truth, beauty, and goodness 
can ever tire, says, in reference to an extravagant etymology : 

" As for those that count the Tatars the offspring of the ten 
tribes of Israel, which Salmanasar led away captive, because Tatari 
or Totari signifieth in the Hebrew and Syriack tongue a residue 
or remnant, learned men have sufficiently confuted it. And 
surely it seemeth a forced and overstrained deduction to farre- 
f etch the name of Tartars from a Hebrew word, a language so far 
distant from them. But no more hereof; because, perchance, 
herein the woman's reason hath a masculine truth ; and the Tar- 
tarians are called so, because they are [called] so. It may be 
curious etymologists (let them lose their wages who work in diffi- 
cult trifles) seek to reap what was never sown, whilst they study 
to make those words speak reason, which are only voces adjplaci- 
tum, imposed at pleasure." 

The theory of Fuller was better than his practice, and he not 
unfrequently indulged in etymological speculations as absurd as 
that which he ridicules respecting the Tatars, for he derives com- 
pliment, not, as he says others did, "a completione men- 
tis," but "a complete mentiri," because compliments are 
usually completely mendacious; and elsewhere he quotes with 
seeming assent Sir John Harrington's opinion that the old Eng- 
lish elf and goblin came from the names of the two great political 
factions of the Empire, the Guelphs and Ghibellines. One can 
hardly believe Roger Ascham serious in deriving war from warre 
or werre, the old form of the comparative worse, because war is 



ragot; — mus, muratus, ratus, rat ; — gibovAee, nimbus, nimbulus, nimbulata, 
3 



guimbulata, ghirribulata, ghibuluta, giboulee. 



50 EXTKAVAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. [Lect. in. 

worse than peace ; * but even this derivation is only less absurd 
than Blackstone's of parson from persona, persona eccle- 
siae, because the parson personates or represents the church. f 
The most extraordinary word-fanciers we have had in English 
literature are Murray and Ker. Murray derives all English, in 
fact all articulate words, from nine primary monosyllables, which 
are essentially natural to primitive man. The family likeness be- 
tween the nine is so strong that Murray might, with much con- 
venience and small loss of probability, have reduced them to one, 
for they all agree in their vowel and final consonant. The cata- 
logue of these surprisingly prolific roots is this : 1, ag, wag, or 
hwag ; 2, bag, or bwag ; 3, dwag ; 4, cwag ; 5, lag ; 6, mag ; 7, 
nag ; 8, rag ; and 9, swag. Ker is somewhat less ambitious, but 
quite as original and ingenious in his theories. He found the 
English public simple enough to buy two editions of a work in 
two volumes, the object of which is to show that a very large pro- 
portion of our current English proverbs are, not translations or 
imitations of Dutch ones, but mere mispronunciations, corruptions 

* Allied to this is Spenser's derivation of world : 

But when the word woxe old, it woxe warre old, 
(Whereof it hight.) 

Faerie Queen, B. iv., C. viii., S. xxxi. 

The ingenious author of the excellent little work on English Synonyms, edited 
by Archbishop Whately, supposes world to be the participle whirled, and says 
the word was evidently expressive of roundness. The wh in whirl, (hv in the 
corresponding Gothic words,) is radical, and would hot have been represented 
in Anglo-Saxon by w, as in w or uld, weoruld, world. Besides this, the 
word world is older than the knowledge of the globular form or the rotation 
of the earth among the Gothic tribes. A still more conclusive argument against 
this etymology is the fact, that the Anglo-Saxon woruld, the Icelandic 
verolld, did not mean the earth, the physical, but the moral, the human 
world, the Latin seculum. The Anglo-Saxon name of the earth was 
middan-eard or middan-geard, corresponding to the Mceso-Gothic 
midjungards. The most probable etymology of world seems to be w e r , 
(cognate with the Latin v i r ,) man, and old, age or time. 

f I must here make the amende honorable to Blackstone ; for notwithstand- 
ing the apparent absurdity of this etymology, and the real absurdity of the 
reasoning by which he supports it, it seems to be certain, as a fact of historical 
derivation, that parson is from persona, and not from the Latin parrochia 
through the French paroissien. See Skeat's Dictionary, S. V. 

This is a good example of the importance of tracing the history of words 
instead of trusting to supposed laws of phonetic change. 



i 



Lect. m] EXTKAVAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. 51 

of common Dutch phrases and expressions totally different in 
meaning from that which is ascribed to the proverbs, as we em- 
ploy them. Thus the proverbial phrase, ' He took the bull by the 
horns,' is a corruption of 'hii tuck tije bol by die hoo- 
r e n s ,' which means, here head calls contrivance in ; that it is 
as it ought to he. ' As still as a mouse,' is, 'als stille als er 
mee hose,' as still as one without shoes or rather, as one in 
his stockings / and even the national cry, ' Old England forever ! ' 
is not plain English at all, but Low-Dutch for 'Hail to your 
country — evince your zeal for her ! ' 

The general idea is of course too absurd to be met by argu- 
ment, and the book is of about the same philological value as 
Swift's Medical Consultation, and other trifles, where the words 
are Latin in form, but similar in sound to English words of 
different signification, so that the Latin words is, his, honor, 
sic, mean, Is his Honor sick ? The speculations of more recent 
and more eminent philologists, though certainly made more plau- 
sible by historical evidence and by apparent analogies, are some- 
times not less unreasonable."* 

Crambe, a character in the Memoirs of Scriblerus much given 

* I certainly do not intend to class Dr. Latham with the dreamers to whom 
I refer in the text, but I must be permitted here to notice what is, at least, an 
inaccuracy of expression in his etymology of our English word drake. He 
says (English Language, 2d Edition, p. 214), "It [drake] is derived from a 
word with which it has but one letter in common; viz., the Latin anas, 
duck." The common name of the duck in the Gothic languages is doubtless 
allied to anas, and in most of them the same root occurs in forms which con- 
tain the consonantal elements of the word drake. Two of these elements, the 
r and k, are signs of the masculine termination. The d is radical, as are also 
the corresponding mute t in the Latin anas (genitive an at -is), and the n 
which has been dropped from drake, or rather perhaps formed the d by coal- 
escence with the t, as in modern Greek, where vr is pronounced d, and there- 
fore drake and anas are related as being both derived from a common root. 
But to assert that drake is derived from anas is not only a violation of the 
legitimate rules of etymological deduction, but it involves the historical in\- 
probability of affirming that a people as old as the Romans themselves were 
without a name for one of the commonest and most important game-birds of 
their climate, until they borrowed one from their foreign invaders. In fact, 
if either nation received the word from the other, instead of both inheriting it 
from some common but remote source, the habits of the bird in question, 
whose birthplace and proper home is in the far North, would render it more 
probable that the Gothic was the original, the Latin the derivative form. 



52 EXTRAVAGANCE OE ETYMOLOGISTS. [Lect. m. 

to punning, declares that he was always under the dominion of 
some particular word, which formed the theme of his pnns. 
Muys, a very late and learned German philologist, who occupies 
himself with Greek etymology, is, unconsciously no doubt, under 
the influence of a similar verbal crotchet. The particular word 
which tyrannizes over his researches is the German verb s t o s s e n , 
in English to jpush. There are several Sanscrit roots possessing 
this signification, and, according to our author, there are few 
Greek words not derived from some one of them. His own 
special favorite among these Sanscrit radicals is dhu, and he 
finds a probability, amounting very nearly to certainty, that the 
following words, as well as hundreds of others equally discrepant 
from the primitive type, are derived from it : Agamemnon, Asia, 
Athene, ^Egyptus, fioojuoS, Gallus, Geryon, Demeter, Eidothea, 
Helle, Enarete, Zephyrus, Hebe, Jocasta, Leda, Polydeuces, 
Sisyphus. The process by which these derivations are made out 
is as simple as possible. Take for instance Gallus. Beginning 
with dhu, spelled d, h, u, if you cut off d, you have hu, 
whence it is but a step to h v a ; h v a passes readily into g a , 
and by adding I, you obtain gal, which wants only the inflec- 
tional final syllable us, with the reduplication of the I, and 
your word is finished. After this, we may well say that etymol- 
ogy, like misery, makes us acquainted with strange bed-fellows.* 
In admitting that most English etymological dictionaries point 
out the origin of the greater part of our vocabulary, I must limit 
the concession to words derived, as are the great majority of ours, 
directly from Greek, Latin, French, or Anglo-Saxon roots still 
to be found in the recorded literature of those languages. With 
respect to words which have traditionally descended from the 
old Gothic storehouse, and which do not occur in the existing 
remains of Anglo-Saxon literature, or which have been borrowed 
from remoter sources, and especially with. respect to the attempts 
made by lexicographers to trace English words, through the lan- 
guages I have named, back to still older dialects, and to detect 

* A French epigrammatist says, upon one of Menage's derivations : 

Alphana vient d'equus, sans doute, 
Mais il faut avouer aussi 
Qu'en venant de la jusqu'ici 
II a bien change sur la route. 



Lect. hi.] TEUE METHOD OF ETYMOLOGY. 53 

affinities to words belonging to the vocabularies of languages not 
of the Gothic or Romance stock, I know no English dictionary 
except Skeat's new etymologicon which is worthy of confidence. 
Take for example our noun and verb issue. Nothing can be 
plainer than its origin to one who is content with the simple 
truth. We have borrowed it from the obsolete French is sir, 
which, as well as the cognate Italian u scire, is evidently a 
modern form of the compound Latin infinitive e x - i r e , to go 
out. A celebrated lexicographer gives, as related words, the 
French and Italian forms, but he fails to see that they are de- 
rived from the Latin exire, and suggests that they coincide 
with the Ethiopic w a t s a ! The tendency of this constant search 
after remote analogies is to lead the inquirer to overlook near and 
obvious sources of derivation, and to create a perplexity and con- 
fusion with regard to the real meaning of words, by connecting 
them with distant roots slightly similar in form, and, frequently, 
not at all in signification. There are, in all literatures, numerous 
instances where words have been corrupted in orthography, and 
finally changed in meaning, in consequence of the adoption of a 
mistaken etymology. An example of this is the common adjec- 
tive abominable, which was once altered in form and meaning by 
a mistake of this sort, though better scholarship has now restored 
it to its true orthography, and more nearly to its proper signifi- 
cation. It is evidently regularly formed from the Latin verb 
abominor, itself derived from ab and omen. Abominable 
accordingly involves the notion of that which is in a religious sense 
profane and detestable, or, in a word, of evil omen ; and Milton 
never uses it, or the conjugate noun abominations, except with 
reference to devilish, profane, or idolatrous objects. Quite early 
in English literature some sciolist fancied that the true etymology 
was a b and homo, and that its proper meaning was repug- 
nant to humanity, inhuman. This derivation being accepted, 
the orthography was changed to abAominable, and in old English 
books it is often used in a sense corresponding to its supposed 
origin, nor has it even yet fully recovered its appropriate meaning. 
We may, in numerous instances, trace back the use of a word 
to a remote antiquity, and find at the same time that it -was em- 
ployed in many languages between which we are unable to detect 
any historical or even grammatical relation. When, in such case, 



54 TRUE METHOD OF ETYMOLOGY. [Lect. in. 

any of the foreign derivative or inflectional changes of the root 
throw light on the form of the corresponding English word, or 
when its radical meaning serves to explain any of the different 
senses which we ascribe to our own vocable, and which are not 
deducible from its known historical etymology, the fact of the 
existence of such a word becomes philologically, as well as lin- 
guistically, interesting. If, however, the foreign word does not 
aid us in understanding or employing the corresponding English 
one, whatever may be its importance in linguistics, it is in Eng- 
lish philology, and of course etymology, wholly insignificant. I 
will borrow an example from languages which I can hardly pre- 
sume to be familiar to many of my audience, and others from 
some domestic sources. The Portuguese word s a u d a d e , which 
expresses an affectionate, regretful longing for a lost or absent 
beloved object, has been said by Portuguese scholars to be pecu- 
liar to their own tongue, and to have no equivalent in any other 
European speech.* A similar word, however, with the same 

* The Portuguese, as appears from a passage in the Leal Conselheiro of 
King Dom Duarte, prided themselves on this word as early as the fifteenth 
century. 

Se algiia pessoa por meu servico e mandado de myn se parte, e della sento 
suydade , certo e que de tal party da nom ey sanha, no jo, pesar, desprazer, 
nem avorrecymento, ca prazme de seer, e pesarmya se nom fosse ; e por se 
partir algtias vezes vem tal suydade que faz chorar, e sospirar como se 
fosse de nojo. E porem me parece este nome de suydade tarn proprio que 
o latym, nem outra linguagem que en saiba, non he pera tal sentido semel- 
hante. Leal Conselheiro, Paris, 1842, p. 151. 

The editor of the Leal Conselheiro quotes a curious passage to the same 
effect from Dom Francisco Manoel. Epanaplwras, 1675, pp. 286, 287. 

The orthography, saudade , became established about the beginning of 
the sixteenth century. The forms, soidade and soedade , which occur 
in early Portuguese writers, countenance the derivation from the Latin solus , 
but the existence of a similar noun, as well as of cognate verbs of allied sig- 
nification, in the Scandinavian languages, suggests the possibility that they all 
belong alike to some Gothic radical. 

Ihre thinks the Scandinavian may be from the root of the verb to seek, in 
analogy with a figurative sense of the Latin qu air ere , and he cites this 
couplet from Horace, Carm. iii. 24 : — 

Virtutem incolumem odimus ; 
Sublatam ex oculis qucerimus invidi. 

Here qucerimus means regret, miss, long for, and this use of the word is 
common in the classic writers. 



Lect. m.] USES OF ETYMOLOGY. 55 

general, and often the same precise, signification, occurs in Ice- 
landic, Swedish and Danish, in the respective forms saknaftr, 
saknad, and Savn. Now there is no link of relationship, 
by which any actual connection can be made ont between the 
Scandinavian and the Portuguese words, no common source to 
which both can be referred, nor does the form or meaning of 
either serve in the least to explain those of the other. The coin- 
cidence is a remarkable fact ; it may become linguistically im- 
portant ; but at present it is not of the slightest consequence to 
the philology of either of the languages in question. In like 
manner, I understand the English words father, mother, brother, 
sister, not at all the better for knowing that they are used in 
forms not widely differing from our own, in most of the lan- 
guages belonging to the Indo-European family. * 

It will be found pretty generally true, that with respect to 
words used in their simple form and literal sense, the study of 
their derivation is of little use in aiding us to form a just concep- 
tion of their meaning ; but if they are compounds, and especially 
if their employment in our language is a figurative one, we are 
essentially assisted by a knowledge of their etymology. If you 
tell a child that our noun and adjective purple is the Anglicised 
form of the Latin purpureus, a word of similar signification, 
you tell him nothing. So if, for the origin of precipitate and 
precipitation, he is barely referred to the Latin prseceps as 
the source of these English words, he has learned what is not 
worth remembering. But if you go further, and explain to him 
that prseceps is a compound of prse, before, and the root of 
caput, the head, so that p r se c e p s and precipitate both mean 
headforemost or headlong, he will have gained an entirely new 
conception of the force of the words. 

I will illustrate the emptiness of etymology as usually pursued, 
and its practical value when studied by simpler and less preten- 
tious methods, by the history of our English word grain in a 

* I may cite as examples of similar accidental coincidences, the American 
switch, English shunt (of a railway), and the Italian sviatojo (from via) ; the 
cant American absquatulate (to abscond), and the Italian sgattainolare, of the 
same signification. 'He gathered up his traps,' is literal in the mouth of the 
American woodsman, but in Catalan, where trap signifies a tent, it means, lie 
broke up his camp. 



56 ETYMOLOGY OF GKAIN. [Lect. m. 

single one of its many senses. I observe in reading II Penseroso 
that Milton describes Melancholy as clad 

" All in a robe of darkest grain." 

Upon turning to Webster for an explanation of grain, I find its 
etymology in twelve closely printed lines, giving twenty-five 
words which the lexicographer supposes to be cognate with gram, 
from thirteen languages. Fifteen meanings, several of which, 
though distinguished, are indistinguishable, are ascribed to grain. 
Among them is dye or tincture, no particular hue being assigned 
to the dye, and as an exemplification of this sense of grain, the 
fine descriptive invocation to Melancholy, to which I have alluded, 
is cited : 

" Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, 

Sober, steadfast and demure, 

All in a robe of darkest grain, 

Flowing with majestic train." 

It is evident that the lexicographer understands Milton as 
clothing the Divinity simply in a garb of a dark color, without 
indication of the quality of the color ; but this conception of the 
meaning of grain, as used in the passage, is wholly erroneous, as 
I shall proceed to show. 

Of the twenty-five words referred to in "Webster's etymology, 
only the Latin granum, with three or four derivatives from it 
in as many modern languages, and the Scandinavian gr en , have 
any probable affinity with grain, in origin or in any of its signi- 
fications, and with the exception of the sense of a prong or tine, 
and perhaps, also, of fibre and the imitations of fibre in painting, 
every one of the fifteen meanings ascribed to the word is refer- 
able to the Latin granum, and not to any of the other roots 
adduced. Both these exceptions belong to a Gothic radical (in 
Swedish, g r e n ) signifying a branch or twig, and still extant in 
the Scottish dialect with the same sense. 

The history of the word grain, in the sense of a dye, is this : 
The Latin granum signifies a seed or kernel, and it was early 
applied to all small objects resembling seeds, and finally to all 
minute particles. Some etymologists, however, derive granum 
from the root of the verb to grind, and define it as that which is 



LECT. m.] ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 57 

ground, or meal, as the German mehl from mahlen. This I hold 
to be an inversion of the genealogy of the word. A species of 
oak, or ilex, the quercus coccifera of botanists, common on 
all the Mediterranean coasts, and especially in Spain where it is 
called coscoja, (a corruption . of the Latin cusculium or 
quisquilium,) is frequented by an insect of the genus coc- 
cus, the dried body, or rather ovarium, of which furnishes a 
variety of red dyes. From its round seed-like form, the prepared 
coccus was called in later Latin, granum, and so great were 
the quantity and value of the coccum or granum produced 
in Spain, that, according to Pliny, it paid half the tribute of the 
province.* It is even said that the city and territory of Granada 
derived their name from the abundance of granum, coccum, 
or grain, gathered there. \ Granum becomes gran a in 
Spanish, graine in French, and from one of these is derived 
the particular use of the English word grain, which we are now 
investigating. Grain, then, as a coloring material, strictly taken, 
means the dye produced by the coccus insect, often called, in com- 
merce and in the arts, Tcermes, but inasmuch as the kermes dye, 
like that extracted from the murex of Tyre, is capable of assum- 
ing a considerable variety of reddish tones or hues, Milton and 

* Coccum is from the Greek kokkoq, a kernel or berry. Kotucog was one of 
the names applied by the Greeks to the insect and the tree on which it bred. 
From kohkoq comes the adjective kokkcvos, denoting the color obtained from the 
insect, as also the Latin coccinus and coccineus employed in the same 
sense. In the "Wycliffite translations of the Bible, this word is found in eight 
different forms, cole being the nearest to the root, coctyn the most remote from 
it. Cottyn, which occurs in Apocalypse xvi. 12, in the version printed as 
Wycliffe's in Bagster's Hexapla, is either a typographical error, or a various 
reading for coctyn, and not an early orthography of cotton. 

The form coccus (masculine) is the modern scientific name of the insect, 
but I believe the neuter, coccum, alone occurs in classical Latin. 

f This derivation of Granada was, I believe, first suggested by Calepin, and 
it is adapted by Facciolati and by some Spanish authors, as, for example, by 
Pellicer, El Fenix, 34, E, but the name has been generally supposed to be of 
Arabic origin. In the chronicles of the Middle Ages, it is generally written 
Gernatha or Garnatha, and upon the supposition that this is the true 
orthography, various absurd Arabic etymologies have been suggested ; but as 
it appears from the Espana Sagrada, new edition, vol. xxix., pp. 201, 209, that 
Granada in Catalonia was called Granatum in the tenth and eleventh 
centuries, I think that the form Garnatha is a Moorish corruption, and that 
Calepin's conjecture is probably well founded. 
3* 



58 ETYMOLOGY OF GEALTT. [Lect. hi. 

other English poets often use grain as equivalent to Tyrian pur- 
ple. We will now apply this etymology to the interpretation of 
the passage which Webster cites from Milton, and will also ex- 
amine all the other instances in which grain is employed in the 
sense of a color by that poet and by Shakespeare. 
First, then, the verses from II Penseroso : 

" Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, 
Sober, steadfast and demure, 
All in a robe of darkest grain, 
Flowing with majestic train." 



Here the epithet " darkest," and the character and attributes of 
the Divinity who is clothed in grain, show that the poet meant, 
not, as Webster supposes, a mourning black, or a dull, neutral 
tint, but the violet shade of purple. What a new beauty of 
imagery this explanation sheds on one of Milton's most exquisite 
creations ! 

Coleridge, who, of all English writers, is most attentive to 
etymology, and most scrupulously accurate in the use of words, 
in the preface to his Aids to Reflection has this passage, apparently, 
however, a quotation : " doing as the dyers do, who, having first 
dip't their silks in colors of less value, then give them the last 
tincture of crimson in grain" thus employing the word with a 
just appreciation of its meaning in ordinary poetic usage, but as- 
signing to it a lighter shade than the purple or violet which it 
evidently designates in the passage cited from H Penseroso. It 
should, however, be observed, by way of note, that the process of 
dyeing, in ancient times when both grain and Tyrian purple were 
in use as coloring materials, was nearly the reverse of that de- 
scribed by Coleridge ; for Pliny, speaking of the practice of dye- 
ing with two colors or shades of color, says : " ISTay, it will not 
serve their turne to mingle the abovesaid tinctures of seafishes, 
but they must also doe the like by the die of landcolors; for 
when a wool or cloth hath taken a crimson or skarlet in graine, 
it must be dyed again in the Tyrian purple, to make the light 
red, and fresh lustie-gallant. As touching the graine serving to 
give tincture, it is red, and cometh out of Galatia, or else about 
Emerita in Portugal," etc. Holland's Pliny, ix., 41. 



Lect. m.] ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 59 

Again, in the 11th Book of Paradise Lost, v. 213-9, Milton 
employs the same word to denote still another tone of color : 

" The archangel soon drew nigh, 
Not in his shape celestial, but as man 
Clad to meet man : over his lucid arms 
A military vest of purple flowed 
Livelier than Meliboean, or the grain 
Of Sarra, worn by kings and heroes old 
In time of truce ; Iris had dipped the woof." 

In this passage a brighter color, approaching to scarlet, is evi- 
dently meant. Now, grain of Sarra is grain of Tyre, Sarra being 
nsed by some Latin authors for Tyrus, and grain of Sarra is 
equivalent to purple of Tyre, Milton here employing, as I have 
just observed, the name of the color obtained from the kermes, 
coccus or grain, as synonymous with purple of Tyre, which latter 
dye was the product of different species of shell-fish.* The Greek 
nopcpvpeos, and the Latin purpureus, embraced all shades of 
color between scarlet and dark violet inclusive, because all these 
hues were obtained from shell-fish by different mixtures and pro- 
cesses. In fact, though in common speech we generally confine 
our use of the English purple to the violet hue, yet it is employed 
poetically, and in reference to ceremonial costumes, to express as 
wide a range of colors as the corresponding Greek and Latin 
adjectives, f 

* The ancient writers carefully distinguish between the costly shell-fish pur- 
ple and the cheaper c o c c u m . Thus Martial V. 23 : 

Non nisi vel cocco madida", vel murice tinctil 
Veste nites. 

And Ulpian Dig. xxxii. 1, 70, 13. 

Purpurae appellatione omnis generis purpuram contineri puto, sed 
c o c c u m non continebitur. 

There is an interesting and even eloquent passage on the value attached by 
the Romans to the true purple in Pliny, Nat. Hist. IX. 36. 

Aelf ric, Homilies, ii. , 253-4, uses wolcn-read for scarlet in giving the 
narrative of the Passion, where Matth. xxvii. 28 has, in the Greek text, 
x'/.a/ivda kokk'lvt]v. Wolcn, wolcen, weoluc,weolc,the modern Eng. 
whelk, is a shell-fish, in this case, the Tyrian murex. This root is employed 
in Anglo-Saxon in many compounds denoting purple or scarlet, and the Anglo- 
Saxons must of course have been acquainted with the source from which the 
ancient purples were obtained. 

f Many shades of Tyrian purple are enumerated in Pliny. Nat. Hist., ix. 
62, 65, (Holland's Trans., ix. 38-41.) 



60 ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIIS". [Lect. m. 

In describing the " proper shape " of the Archangel Eaphael in 
the Fifth Book of Paradise Lost, the poet nses grain in the sense 
of purple, and gives to it at once the whole extent of its varied 
significations : 

Six wings lie wore, to shade 
His lineaments divine : the pair that clad 
Each shoulder broad came mantling o'er his breast 
With regal ornament ; the middle pair 
Girt like a starry zone his waist, and round 
Skirted his loins and thighs with downy gold 
And colors dipp'd in heaven .; the third his feet 
Shadowed from either heel with feathered mail, 
Sky-tinctured grain. 

Those who remember the hnes which the painters of the six- 
teenth century give to the wings of angels, will be at no loss to 
understand the epithet sky-tintured, which here qualifies grain. 
Sky-tinctured is not necessarily azure, for sky in Old English and 
the cognate languages, meant cloud,* and Milton does not confine 
its application to the concave blue, but embraces in the epithet all 
the brighter tints which belong to meteoric phenomena. Doubt- 
less he had in his mind the angels that he had seen depicted by 

* Sky in sense of cloud. 

* * * a certeine winde * 
That blewe so hidously and hie, 
That it ne left not a skie 

In all the welkin long and brode. 

Chaucer, House of Fame, iii. 508-511. 

* * * allsodeinly 

She passeth as it were a skie 
All clene out of this ladies sight. 

Gower, Conf. Amant. iv., Pauli's ed., ii. 50. 

* * * Aurora, which afore the sunne 
Is wont t' enchase the blacke skyes dunne. 

Ltdgate, in Troy-Boke, War ton, II. xxiii. 

That purpour sone * * * 
***** 

Throw goldin skyis putting up his head. 

Idem, Warton, II. xxx. 

The Promptorium Parvulorum has: "Hovyfi yn the eyre, as byrdys, 
[bryddys,] or skyis, or other lyke," &c. 



Lect. hi.] ETYMOLOGY OF GKAIIST. 61 

the great Italian masters, and chose the phrase " sky-tinctured 
grain " as embodying, like their pinions, all the gorgeous sponta- 
neous hues of sun-lit cloud, and rainbow, and cerulean vault, to- 
gether with the richest colors which human cunning had extracted 
from the materials of creative nature. It is interesting to observe 
how the brilliancy of the image floating in the poet's fancy per- 
vades the whole passage, and anticipates, by a vague and general 
expression, the specification of the particular colors which he 
ascribes to the wings of the archangel ; for in his description of 
the first pair, which 

Came mantling o'er his breast 
"With reqal ornament : 



he no doubt meant to suggest the imperial purple, the appropri- 
ate cognizance of loyalty. 

In Comus [748] we find grain again employed as the name of 
a particular color : 

" It is for homely features to keep home, 
They had their name thence ; coarse complexions, 
And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply 
The sampler, and to tease the housewife's wool. 
What need a vermeil tinctured lip for that, 
Love-darting eyes, or tresses like the morn?" 

Grain here does not refer to the texture of the skin, which is 
sufficiently indicated by the epithet coarse in the preceding line, 
but to the color, the vermilion of the cheek and lips which, for 
those devoted to such humble duties, the enchanter Comus thinks 
may well be sorry or of inferior tint.* This interpretation is 
confirmed by a passage in Chaucer, 

* There is a curious discussion in Athenaeus, xiii. 8, on the propriety of the 
application of the epithet purple to the cheek, in the verse of Phrynichus : 

Aa/nret 6' ettl 7ropdvpeaig izapTjia (f>(bg epurog ; 
and that of Simonides : 

TLoptyvpsov airb oro/uavoc; lelaa cbuvdv irapdevog, 

the former of which, no doubt, suggested to Gray his 

" purple light of love," 

and to earlier poets the similar expressions collected in Mitf ord's edition of 
Gray. 



62 ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. [Lect. m. 

"His lippes reed as rose, 
His rode is like scarlet en grayn;" 

rode meaning complexion. And in the epilogue to the Eonnes 
Preestes Tale, in Tyrwhitt's edition, Chancer, speaking of a man 
of a sangnine complexion, says : 

Him nedeth not his colour for to dien, 
With Brazil, ne with grain of Portingale. 

The phrase purple-iti-grain, applied to the beard in Midsum- 
mer Night's Dream, I. 2, signifies a color obtained from kermes, 
and doubtless refers to a hair-dye of that material : 

Bottom. — Well, I will undertake it. What beard were I best 
to play it in ? 

Quin. — Why, what you will. 

Bottom. — I will discharge it in either your straw-colored beard, 
your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your 
French crown-colored beard, your perfect yellow. 

Again, Webster defines the phrase to dye in grain, " to dye in 
the raw material, as wool or silk, before it is manufactured." 
That the phrase is popularly misunderstood, and has long been 
commonly used in this sense is true, but the original signification 
is dyed with grain or kermes. 

The explanation of this familiar and figurative sense, which is 
given by the lexicographer as the proper and literal one, is simple. 
The color obtained from kermes or grain was a peculiarly dura- 
ble, or as it is technically called, 2, fast or fixed dye, lor fast used 
in this sense is, etymologically, fixed. When then a merchant 
recommended his purple stuffs, as being dyed in grain, he origi- 
nally meant that they were dyed with hermes, and would wear 
well, and this phrase, by a common process in language, was af- 
terwards applied to other colors, as a mode of expressing the quali- 
ty of durability.* Thus in the Comedy of Errors, (iii. 2,) to the 
observation of Antipholus : 

* The bright reds of the old Brussels tapestry, so remarkable for the dura- 
bility as well as the brilliancy of their tints, are known to have been dyed with 
kermes or grain. 

" There is another sort of Tunalls which * * * beares another commoditie 
and profit, which is of the graine, for that certain e small wormes breede in the 



Lect. iii.] ETYMOLOGY OF GKAIN. 63 

That's a fault that water will mend — 
Dromio replies : 

No, Sir, 'tis in grain ; Noah's flood could not do it. 

And in Twelfth Night, (act 1, scene 5,) when Olivia had un- 
veiled, and speaking of her own face had asked : 

Is it not well done ? 

to Viola's insinuation that her complexion had been improved bj 

art; 

Excellently done, if God did all ; 

Olivia replies : 

'Tis in grain, Sir ; 'twill endure wind and weather. 

In both these examples it is the sense of permanence, a well- 
known quality of the purple produced by the grain or kermes, 
that is expressed.* It is fam ; liarly known that if wool be dyed 
before spinning, the color is usually more permanent than when 
the spun yarn or manufactured cloth is first dipped in the tincture. 
When the original sense of grain grew less familiar, and it was 
used chiefly as expressive of fastness of color, the name of the 
effect was transferred to an ordinary known cause, and dyed m 
grain, originally meaning dyed with kermes, then dyed with fast 
color, came at last to signify dyed in the wool or other raw ma- 

leaues of this tree, * * * and this is that Indian Cochenille so famous, and 
wherewith they die in graine," Purchas, iii. 957. Cochineal yields colors 
much like those obtained from coccum or grana. Hence the name of 
grain was applied to it, and this passage among many others shows that dyeing 
in grain meant dyeing with coccum or grana, or with chocineal. 

To the same purpose are the following expressions to which a friend refers 
me in Hakluyt, ed. 1589: "violets in graine and fine reds be most worne"; 
" violets died in graine with purple colors and fine reds," p. 380; " Graine that 
you dye scarlet withall," 383. 

* As examples of the figurative use of the phrase, in grain, see de Meung, 
Testament, p. 437. 

Amour d'omme envers fame n'est mie tainte en graine; 
Por trop pou se destaint, por trop pou se desgraine ; 

and Chaucer's Squire's Tale, line 511 : 

So depe in greine he deiede his coloures. 



64 ETYMOLOGY OF aEAIN. [Lect. ra. 

terial. The verb ingrain, meaning to incorporate a color or qual- 
ity with the natural substance, comes from grain used in this last 
sense, and is now very extensively employed in both a literal and 
a figurative acceptation. 

Kermes, which I have used as a synonym of g r a n a or grain, 
is the Arabic and Persian name of the coccus insect, and the' 
word occurs in a still older form, krmi, in Sanscrit. From this 
root are derived the words carmine and crimson, common to all 
the European languages.* The Romans sometimes applied to the 
coccus the generic name vermiculus, a little worm or insect. 
Yermiculus is the diminutive of vermis, which is doubt- 
less cognate with the Sanscrit krmi, as is also the English word 
worm. From vermiculus comes vermilion, the name of an 
allied color erroneously supposed to be produced by the kermes, 
though in fact of a different origin, and I may add that cochineal, 
as the name both of a dye which has now almost wholly super- 
seded the European grain, and of the American insect which pro- 
duces it, is derived, through the Spanish, from coccum, the 
Latin name of the Spanish insect. Johnson, and even Richard- 
son, mistake the meaning of grain, and ascribe to it the same sig- 
nification as "Webster. Richardson derives it from the Saxon 
geregnan, certainly a wrong etymology, and they both refer 

* Italian, ehermisi, cliermisino. See Tommaseo, s. v. 

The French employ both cramoisi, crimson, and ecarlate, scarlet, 
as intensives. Bleu cramoisi meant, in Old French, deep blue, ecarlate 
noir , deep black, and we find in Foulques Fitz Warin, p. 70, " e se vestirent 
deunescarlet vert," and dressed in deep green. So in Kyng Alisaundpr, 
which was translated from the French, v. 4986-7 : 

Thy clothen hem with grys and ermyne 
With golde and siluer and skarlet pers fine ; 

where skarlet pers means deep blue. 

In both languages, these words are used figuratively in an analogous 
sense. A rogue in grain is a thoroughly corrupt knave. Etre sot ou laid e n 
cramoisi is, to be thoroughly foolish or ugly, and Cotgrave gives "sot en 
cramoisi, an ass in grain." Rabelais, v. xlvi. , has en cramoisi for 
perfectly : " Par sainct Jan ie rhythmeray comme les aultres, ie le sens bien ; 
attendez, et mayez pour excuse si ie ne rhy thme encramoysy." 

The verb ingrain originally signified dyed with grain. 

Hire robe was f ul riche 
Of reed scarlet engreyned. 

Piers Ploughman, Vision, 908. 



Lect. m.] ETYMOLOGY OF GKAEST. 65 

to most of the passages I have quoted, as exemplifications of the 
erroneous definition they have given it. This is a remarkable 
oversight, because gram, as the English for coccum, was in 
very general use in the seventeenth century, and it is only recently 
that henries has superseded it. Good exemplifications of this em- 
ployment of the word will be found in Holland's Pliny, i. 259, 
261, 461, ii. 114, and in many other old English writers. 

It will, I think, be admitted that in every passage which I have 
cited in illustration of the meaning of the word grain, the knowl- 
edge of its true origin and signification gives additional force and 
beauty to the thought in the expression of which it is employed, 
and I have selected it as a striking example of the advantages to 
be derived from the careful study of words, and especially of the 
light which is thus often thrown upon obscure figurative expres- 
sions, as contrasted with the insignificance of the bare fact that 
the same word or root exists in other languages. It is, however, 
rarely the case that a simple uncompounded word so well repays 
the labor of investigation, though the analysis of many compound 
words will be found equally instructive. 

The importance of habitual attention to the exact meaning of 
words, considered simply as a mental discipline, can hardly be 
overrated, and etymology is one of the most efficient means of 
arriving at their true signification. But etymology alone is never 
a sure guide. In passing from one language to another, words 
seldom fail to lose something of their original force, or to acquire 
some new significance, and we can never be quite safe on this 
point, until we have established the precise meaning of a word by 
a comparison of different passages where it occurs in good 
authors. 



LECTUEE IV. 

FOREIGN HELPS TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH. 

From the opinions I have already expressed, it will have been 
observed, that I do not hold any wide range of linguistic learning 
necessary to the attainment of a good knowledge of English 
etymology. I am equally well persuaded that English grammar, 
so far as respects the application of its principles to practical use, 
may be thoroughly mastered with little or no aid from foreign 
sources. The purpose of the present remarks will be to enforce 
this opinion, and in a cursory way to point out how far the study 
of foreign languages is useful in this respect, and what particular 
tongues are most important to the student for the purposes of 
English philology. In considering the subject of grammatical 
inflections in a subsequent part of the course, I shall particularly 
notice the relations between inflected and nninflected languages, 
and for this reason I shall, on this occasion, refer to the grammar 
of the classical languages only in very general terms.* 

* A speaker, who strives to accustom himself to accuracy of thought and 
precision of expression, is often made painfully sensible of the danger of mis- 
apprehension to which he is exposed in discoursing upon subjects incapable of 
illustration by visible symbols, representations, or experiments. The danger is 
much increased, if the range of his discussion is comprehensive. His language 
must necessarily be condensed, and his propositions must succeed each other 
with a rapidity which hardly allows the unprepared hearer to distinguish and 
comprehend them. Besides this, he must often express himself in general terms, 
omitting the exceptions and qualifications which are necessary for the exhibition 
of the whole truth. In this latter necessity, lies one of the most fertile sources 
of error with respect to all those doctrines which are communicated by general 
propositions. Again, so strong is the natural tendency to generalize that which 
is particular, that every public teacher runs also the opposite risk of being un- 
derstood to announce as universal propositions opinions which he intends to 
confine to very special cases. It is against this last mistake that I am at this 
moment particularly solicitous to guard. While I admit that a knowledge of 
(66) 



Lect. iv.] GOETHE'S OPINIONS ON PHILOLOGY. 67 

It is an apophthegm of Goethe, that " He who is acquainted with 
no foreign tongue knows nothing of his own." The indiscrim- 
inate admiration with which this great writer is regarded by his 
followers, leads them to consider his most trivial and unguarded 
utterances as oracles. Even so able a linguist as Heyse has quoted 
this apophthegm as an authority in proof of the value and im- 
portance of linguistic studies ; but I must express my total dis- 
sent from both what is expressed and what is implied in this 
sweeping declaration.* If, by knowledge, is meant the power of 

other tongues, including the Greek and Latin as well as the modern dialects 
more nearly allied to our own, may be so employed as to be of great value as 
an auxiliary to the study of English — a truth of which this course of lectures 
will adduce many illustrations — I am proceeding to avow my conviction, that 
the value of foreign philological studies, in this particular respect, is too often 
overrated by classical scholars. And here I beg not to be understood as mean- 
ing any thing more than I express. I am speaking of the study of one gram- 
mar as an aid to the knowledge of another ; of languages, not of letters ; of 
the forms of speech, not of the embodied thoughts of the great masters of 
literature in other tongues. As a means of that encyclopedic culture which is 
one of the most imperious demands of modern society, an acquaintance with 
foreign, and especially with classical, literature is indispensable, because the 
records of knowledge and of thought are many-tongued, and even if a genial 
writer could have framed his original conceptions or equivalents of them in a 
different speech, it is certain that another mind can, only in the fewest cases, 
adequately translate them. We can therefore, in general, know little of ancient 
or foreign intellectual action, without a knowledge of the medium of thought 
in which that action has been exerted. 

* The observation of a long life has convinced me that the best method of 
acquiring a thorough knowledge of English is the study of English alone, 
whether by books or by the ear. Of the two persons I have known most re- 
markable for strict conformity to the best usage in conversational English 
one was an Alsatian barber who had a shop in a district in New York city 
chiefly inhabited by cultivated persons ; the other was a Vermont farmer, who 
kept a small inn in a country town and who was often a member of the State 
Legislature, where he had occasion to make oratorical use of his knowledge 
of English. He had much pride on the subject, and I have often asked him 
about the methods of his study — for to speak good English was the study of 
his life. He told me that he followed the best speakers whom he had an oppor- 
tunity to hear, but that he had learnt most of all from his mother. On one 
occasion when I was conducting a law-suit for him, a leading witness on the 
opposite side testified he had said in a discussion about the merits of two 
eminent politicians, that Mr. A. was not to he named in the same day with Mr. 
B. My client told me afterwards that the loss of the suit grieved him much 
less than the public statement that he had sanctioned an expression which 
he regarded as a vulgarism, though it was then much in use. " You know," 



68 goethe's opinions on philology. [Lect. rv. 

expressing or conceiving the laws of a particular language in 
formal rules, the opinion may be well founded, but if it refers 
to the capacity of understanding, and skill in properly using, our 
own tongue, all observation shows it to be very wide of the truth. 
Goethe, himself, certainly knew German, and his intellectual 
training and general culture were no doubt much advanced by 
the study of other literatures, but, if tried by the present stand- 
ard of philological learning, or even by that of his own time, he 
must be pronounced at best an indifferent linguist, and it would 
be very difficult to trace any of the excellences of his marvel- 
lously felicitous style to the direct imitation, or even the uncon- 
scious influence, of foreign models. He declares, himself, that 
his knowledge of French was acquired by practice, " without 
grammar or instruction," and remarks that in his early years his 
attention was specially devoted to German writers of the sixteenth 
century. Probably the study of these authors contributed more 
than any thing else to the diction he finally adopted ; for his 
writings contain no evidence of familiarity with the remoter 
etymological sources of his own tongue, or with the special phi- 
lologies of the cognate languages. The comparison of his auto- 
biography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, in which his style reached 
perhaps its culminating point, with the best writers of antiquity, 
will show few parallelisms in any thing that can be said to be 
purely indicative of classical learning. The works of Goethe, in 
which critics, unacquainted with his literary biography, would 
find the strongest internal evidence of a great knowledge of for- 
eign philology and literature, would probably be the Oriental 
poems in the "West-Oestlicher Divan, and his Slavic imitations. 
Yet I believe it is quite certain that he knew nothing of Arabic 
and Persian, or of the Slavonic languages. He had formed his 
acquaintance with the characteristics of those literatures only 
from translations and critical discussions, and his reproduction of 
their poetry in his native German was not a proof of linguistic 



lie said, " and every man who knows me and knows English knows, that I 
allow myself to use no such colloquialisms." This struck me especially be- 
cause, only a few days before, I had* heard the very same expression employed 
in a moment of temporary embarrassment by one of the most eloquent and 
certainly the most fastidious of New England orators. 



Lect. iv.] goethe's opinions on philology. 69 

learning, but it was the exercise of a genius above learning, of 
a power that divined and appropriated the spirit of composi- 
tions, to the comprehension of which other men attain only by a 
critical study of the letter. I might, therefore, confidently rely 
on the works of Goethe himself, as a test example in refutation 
of the theory which ascribes such value to linguistic pursuits. 
All literature is full of similar instances, and there is scarcely a 
nation which boasts a written speech, that cannot produce writers 
of the highest rank, so far as respects force, accuracy, and purity 
of diction, whose knowledge of language was confined to their 
mother-tongue. The measure of our knowledge of a particular 
art, is the ability to use it, and he who most aptly says that which 
he has to say, has given the best evidence that he possesses, in 
full extent, what is appropriately called knowledge of the tongue 
he employs. To can and to Teen or Jcnow express, both in Ger- 
man and English, associate ideas and are related words, and in all 
that belongs to human language, as in most other fields of 
thought and action, knowledge is power, and power is knowledge. 
At the most flourishing period of ancient Grecian literature, 
the Greeks had developed no grammatical system, nor is there 
any satisfactory evidence, internal or external, that written rules 
for the use of their language then existed. All this was the work 
of later ages. In no era of their literary history, did they pro- 
duce critical treatises which exhibit a sound theoretical acquaint- 
ance with the principles of general grammar, and their etymo- 
logical researches were never any thing but absolutely puerile. 
The great writers of Greece, as there is every reason to believe, 
were, in general, wholly ignorant of any speech but the common 
tongue of the Hellenic nation, and yet no literature can exhibit 
more marked examples, not merely of high intellectual culture 
and power, but of the most consummate dexterity in the choice 
and collocation of words, in the adaptation of style and vocabulary 
to the subject, or a more delicate sense of fitness and propriety in 
determining when to conform to the laws of rigorous grammati- 
cal concord, and when to rise above them ; when to give full ex- 
pression to every word that could modify the thought to the mind 
of the listener, and when to electrify him by bold ellipsis and 
sudden transition. The mightiest master of words the world 
ever knew was Demosthenes, who certainly was acquainted with 



70 STYLE OF THUCYDIDES. [Lect. IV. 

no language but Greek, and who built bis own magic style on 
the foundation of Thucydides, a writer most remarkable for bis 
independence of all tbat was arbitrary, all that was formal, and 
all that was conventional in the dialect of his country and his 
time/* 

The education of this greatest of historical writers was purely 
Hellenic. No study of old Pelasgic, or Egyptian, or Phoeni- 
cian, or Persian, had taught him any thing of the remote analo- 
gies and primitive etymologies of the Attic speech, nor could his 
principles of literary composition have been deduced from gram- 
matical or rhetorical precepts, but the untutored expression of his 
native genius spontaneously shaped itself into the style, which 
has made his great work what he prophetically hoped, v f/juatK 
i$ deiy 'b perpetual possession for all coming ages. 

The frequency of obvious etymologies in Greek, it may be 
thought, would serve to a native the same purpose as does the 
study of foreign tongues to us who speak a language of so mixed a 

* It is often impossible to resolve the language of Thucydides and of other 
early writers into what are technically called periods, and we frequently 
observe the absence of a periodic structure in the conversation, not merely 
of unschooled persons, but of all who habitually speak in an inartificial style. 
I may illustrate the manner of Thucydides, certainly not with a view of ridi- 
culing the diction of that immortal author, but in a way intelligible to per- 
sons not familiar with Greek, by an extract from a pugilistic challenge of 
about the year 1700, which I find in the New York Tribune, in a letter from 
a correspondent at Buffalo, dated Oct. 16, 1858. It is said to have been taken 
from an old newspaper in possession of Mr. Placide, and if not genuine, it is 
at least ben trovato. 

" I, Felix Maguire, first master of the fist in the Kingdom of Ireland, tutor 
to the noted Mr. Holmes, who has fought the celebrated Mr. Figg this season 
with general applause, the last of which battles I was engaged with him my- 
self, whereas I hit the said Mr. Figg on the belly and gave him other con- 
vincing proof of my judgment therein, on Wednesday, the 11th instant, when, 
contrary to all expectation, Mrs. Stokes, styled the invincible, matchless, un- 
conquerable city championess, took on her to condemn the method of Mr. 
Holmes' displaying his skill before a grand appearance assembled, which, 
with regret, I was obliged to hear, and in regard that said gentleman was 
my pupil, I so far resent it that I hereby invite Mr. James Stokes, together 
with the said Elizabeth, his wife, at their own seat of valor, and at the time 
appointed, to face and fight me and a woman I have trained up to the science 
from her infancy, one of my own country, and who I doubt not will as far 
exceed Mrs. Stokes as she is said to have done those she has hitherto been 
concerned with." 



Lect. iv.] ETYMOLOGY OF COMPOUNDS. 71 

character. But there is a large proportion of the Greek vocabu- 
lary whose derivation is very obscure, and though the perpetual 
habit of forming words at will must have drawn the attention of 
the Greeks to the composite character of their vocables, and to 
the sources of figurative and abstract words, and of terms of art 
drawn from humble and familiar roots, yet such speculations do 
not seem to have been systematically followed, nor does the man- 
ner in which Greek authors use established compounds often be- 
tray any consciousness of their origin. 

The etymology of words compounded of very familiar roots 
will no doubt often occur to those who use them. The word 
steain-loat is very apt to suggest the notion of the agency by 
which such vessels are propelled, and the boy who asks for gin- 
ger-h^ead, the ambrosial cate of rustic life, is reminded by its very 
name of the characteristic ingredient which enters into the com- 
position of that delicacy. But long use deadens us to the suscep- 
tibility of such images, and if the source of a word is in the least 
unfamiliar, it habitually passes unnoticed. I have heard a distin- 
guished poet say that the Latin imago first suggested itself to 
him as the root of the English word imagination, when, after 
having been ten years a versifier, he was asked by a friend to de- 
fine this most important term in the critical vocabulary of his 
art. 

To come down to later times, and a remote but cognate people, 
we find in the early literature of Iceland a historical work of un- 
certain authorship, but probably of the twelfth century, entitled 
Njala, the saga or biography of N jail, a work betraying no evi- 
dence of classical or other foreign linguistic knowledge, and most 
certainly bearing no analogy to any known model of composition 
in any other language, but which, as an example of pure stylistic 
excellence, may fairly be pronounced altogether unsurpassed by 
any existing monument in the narrative department of any liter- 
ature ancient or modern. 

Scarcely less conclusive on this point is the example of Shake- 
speare. "We cannot indeed positively deny that the great drama- 
tist had enjoyed a partial scholastic training, yet on the other hand 
there is no extraneous proof that he possessed any foreign linguis- 
tic attainment, and the attempt to infer his classical education from 
the internal evidence of his works is simply a begging of the 



72 EDUCATION OF SHAKESPEAEE. [Lect. iv. 

question. It has been argued that Shakespeare was a classical 
scholar, because Ben Jonson says he possessed " small Latin and 
less Greek," while another contemporary ascribes to him " little 
Latin and no Greek." Halliwell thinks he certainly knew Italian, 
because Manningham compares Twelfth Night to an Italian play 
called Inganni. But such proofs as these are even feebler 
than those by which it has been attempted to convict him of 
deer-stealing, or to show, now that he was a cabin-boy, now. an 
incipient Lord Chancellor. So far as concerns the facts of ancient 
and modern European history and biography, we know that the 
English reader had, through translations, abundant means of ac- 
cess to all the information on these points which Shakespeare dis- 
plays, and in an age when prominent writers affected Latinism in 
style, classical turns of expression were too common in English to 
need to be sought in the dead languages alone. The supposition 
of such a scholastic training as even a very moderate acquaintance 
with Latin alone implies, is at variance with the known facts of 
Shakespeare's history ; and it is highly improbable that a young man 
of his country and social condition, who married and entered upon 
the duties and cares of active life at the age of eighteen, could 
have acquired such an amount of philological learning as percep- 
tibly to affect his style and his command of the resources of his 
native tongue. We are then fairly entitled to class him among 
the men of one speech, until stronger evidence shall be adduced 
than has yet appeared to the contrary. 

Even " learned " Ben Jonson was ignorant of French, as ap- 
pears from his Sonnet addressed to Joshua Sylvester; and not 
many English authors have possessed a more attractive or more 
strictly idiomatic style, not many have exhibited a wider variety 
of expression, than Izaak Walton, but Walton had no classical 
learning, and his orthography, hogoe* for haut gout, shows 
that he knew as little of French. Our American Franklin formed 
his remarkable style by the assiduous study of English models, 
before he had any acquaintance with other languages, and we 
have had in our own times an illustrious example of the posses- 
sion of an excellent style and a very wide command of words, 
without any philological attainment whatever, except such as can 

* Compleat Angler, edition of 1653, p. 160. 



LECT. iv.] SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATUEE. 73 

be acquired by the study of the English tongue. The late Hugh 
Miller, to whom I refer, had few contemporaneous superiors as a 
clear, forcible, accurate, and eloquent writer, and he uses the most 
cumbrous Greek compounds as freely as monosyllabic English 
particles. Yet it is certain that he was wholly ignorant of all 
languages but that in which he wrote, and its Northern provin- 
cial dialects. 

"When we consider the wide range of modern intellectual pur- 
suits, the immense accumulation of apparently isolated but cer- 
tainly related facts, which the press in its multiplied forms of ac- 
tivity is hourly bringing before us, the vast additions to even our 
fireside vocabulary from every branch of natural science, every 
field of speculative investigation, it is easy to perceive that we re- 
quire many accessory disciplines to make us thorough masters 
even of the dialect of ordinary cultivated society. To exemplify : 
though the terms mathematics and metaphysics are themselves 
Greek, yet our metaphysical and mathematical nomenclatures are, 
with modified meanings, borrowed chiefly from the Latin, our chem- 
ical from the Greek, and hundreds of words have been introduced 
from the dialects of these studies into the vocabulary of common lif e, 
often indeed with changes or qualifications of signification, but still 
retaining much of their original value. Now, no amount of classical 
knowledge will enable us to comprehend the meaning attached to 
most of these words in the modern vocabulary. Hydrogen and oxy- 
gen, meiocene zradpleiocene, are modern compounds of Greek roots, 
but however familiar their radicals, these terms would no more 
explain themselves to the intelligence of a Greek, than to an un- 
lettered Englishman. Their scientific signification must be sought 
in scientific treatises, and the etymology cf such words is of no 
importance as a guide to their meaning, though as a remembrancer, 
it may be of some value.* We cannot learn all words through 
other words. There is a large and rapidly increasing part of all 
modern vocabularies, which can be comprehended only by the 
observation of nature, scientific experiment, in short by the study 
of things, and therefore Goethe might have said, with greater 
truth, "He that is imbued with no scientific culture has no 
knowledge of his mother-tongue." 



See Lecture ix. 



V4: « COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH. [Lect. rv. 

It must, nevertheless, be admitted that a knowledge of certain 
other philologies is a highly useful anxiliar y in the study of our 
own. Indeed, so important are snch studies, and so few are they 
who will seriously set themselves about the investigation of the 
structural laws of the English tongue, with such seemingly inad- 
equate helps alone as it offers to facilitate the researches of the 
native inquirer, that in laying down general plans of education, a 
course of foreign philology and literature has been usually pre- 
scribed, avowedly as a collateral means of instruction in English 
grammar and syntax, rather than as an independent discipline. 

There are two languages, which, considered simply as philolog- 
ical aids to the student of English, must take precedence, the one 
as having contributed most largely to our vocabulary and built up 
the framework of our speech, the other, both as having somewhat 
influenced the structure of English, and as being in itself a sort 
of embodiment of universal grammar, a materialization, I might 
almost say a petrification, of the radical principles of articulate 
language. These are the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin tongues. 

When an intelligent foreigner commences the study of English, 
he finds every page sprinkled with words whose form unequivo- 
cally betrays a Greek or Latin origin, and he observes that these 
terms are words belonging to the dialect of the learned profes- 
sions, of theological discussion, of criticism, of elegant art, of 
moral and intellectual philosophy, of abstract science and of the 
various branches of natural knowledge. He discovers that the 
words which he recognizes as Greek and Latin and French have 
dropped those inflections which, in their native use, were indis- 
pensable to their intelligibility and grammatical significance ; that 
the mutual relations of vocables and the sense of the English pe- 
riod are much more often determined by the position of the 
words than by their form, and in short that the sentence is built 
up upon structural principles wholly alien to those of the classical 
languages, and compacted and held together by a class of words 
either unknown or very much less used in those tongues. He 
finds that very many of the native monosyllables are mere deter- 
minatives, particles, auxiliaries, and relatives ; and he can hardly 
fail to infer that all the intellectual part of our speech, all that 
concerns our highest spiritual and temporal interests, is of alien 
birth, and that only the merest machinery of grammar has been 



Lect. iv.] COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH. 75 

derived from a native source. Further study would teacli him 
that he had overrated the importance and relative amount of the 
foreign ingredients ; that many of our seemingly insignificant and 
barbarous consonantal monosyllables are pregnant with the might- 
iest thoughts, and alive with the deepest feeling ; that the lan- 
guage of the purposes and the affections, of the will and of the heart, 
is genuine English-born ; that the dialect of the market and the 
fireside is Anglo-Saxon ; that the vocabulary of the most impres- 
sive and effective pulpit orators has been almost wholly drawn 
from the same pure source ; that the advocate who would con- 
vince the technical judge, or dazzle and confuse the jury, speaks 
Latin ; while he who would touch the better sensibilities of his 
audience, or rouse the multitude to vigorous action, chooses his 
words from the native speech of our ancient fatherland ; that the 
domestic tongue is the language of passion and persuasion, the 
foreign, of authority, or of rhetoric and debate ; that we may not 
only frame single sentences, but speak for hours, without em- 
ploying a single imported word ; and finally that we possess the 
entire volume of divine revelation in the truest, clearest, aptest 
form in which human ingenuity has made it accessible to modern 
man, and yet with a vocabulary, wherein, saving proper names 
and terms not in their nature translatable, scarce seven words in 
the hundred are derived from any foreign source. 

In fact, so complete is the Anglo-Saxon in itself, and so much 
of its original independence is still inherited by the modern Eng- 
lish, that if we could but recover its primitive flexibility and plas- 
tic power, we might discard the adventitious aids and ornaments 
which we have borrowed from the heritage of Greece and Rome, 
supply the place of foreign by domestic compounds, and clothe 
again our thoughts and our feelings exclusively in a garb of native, 
living, organic growth. 

Such then being the relations between Anglo-Saxon and mod- 
ern English, it can need no argument to show that the study of 
our ancient mother-tongue is an important, I may say an essential, 
part of a complete English education, and though it is neither 
possible, nor in any way desirable, to reject the alien constituents 
of the language, and, in a spirit of unenlightened and fanatical 
purism, thoroughly to Anglicise our speech, yet there is abundant 
reason to hope that we may recover, and reincorporate into our 



76 SAXON ELEMENT IN ENGLISH. [Lect. rv\ 

common Anglican dialect, many a gem of rich poetic wealth that 
now lies buried in more forgotten depths than even those of 
Chaucer's " well of English undefiled." 

The value of Anglo-Saxon as a branch of English philology is 
most familiar in its relations to our etymology, and its importance 
as an auxiliary in the study of English syntax is far less obvious, 
though not less real. But the structure of the language is too in- 
artificial to be of much use as an instrument of grammatical 
discipline. 

So far as respects English or any other uninfected speech, a 
knowledge of grammar is rather a matter of convenience as a 
nomenclature, a medium of thought and discussion about lan- 
guage, than a guide to the actual use of it, and it is as impossible 
to acquire the complete command of our own tongue by the study 
of grammatical precept, as to learn to walk or swim by attending 
a course of lectures on anatomy.* I shall show more fully on an- 

* As these Lectures are now offered to a wider public than that to which 
they were originally addressed, I cannot help introducing here a few remarks 
that may not be inappropriate under the present circumstances. Probably no 
country in the world has ever drawn so largely on its material and moral re- 
sources for the purpose of advancing the education of its people, as has our 
own. Not to speak of the higher institutions of learning, our common public 
schools have long been a source of national pride, and have deservedly called 
forth the warmest sympathies and the best energies of many of our most pa- 
triotic and enlightened citizens. Examining Boards have been established in 
order, as far as possible, to secure competent teachers, and I am assured that 
the persons who present themselves before these Boards are, as a general rule, 
found to be thoroughly familiar with the best manuals of English grammar, 
and perfectly capable of teaching English syntax correctly. Yet many of 
these same persons, when installed as teachers, will commit, in the very pres- 
ence of the pupils to whom their example is so important, flagrant violations 
of the commonest rules of good speaking. They will analyze and parse without 
fault a diflicult passage of Milton, and, in the very process, use phrases in 
which even the verb and its nominative are at open war. This is perfectly 
natural in the case of young persons possessing more book instruction than 
does the family circle to which they belong and in which they live. They 
speak as they have learned to speak in infancy and childhood, and no amount 
of grammatical or elocutionary knowledge will enable them to overcome their 
early habits, unless they are subjected to a careful special training expressly for 
that purpose — a training which example alone can make really effectual. Now in 
a country like ours, where patriotism, as well as higher considerations, should 
make us earnestly desire that every new generation may surpass its precursor 
in knowledge, is it not most important that such special training should be 
provided for in all our Normal schools, and in such other institutions as aro 



Lect. IV.] STUDY OF GKAMMAK. 77 

other occasion,* that when language had been, to use an expres- 
sive Gallicism, once regimented, and instruction had grown into 
an art, grammar was held with the Greeks, and probably also 
with the Romans, so elementary a discipline, that a certain 
amount of knowledge of it was considered a necessary prelimi- 
nary step towards learning to read and write; but in English, 
grammar has little use except to systematize, and make matter of 
objective consideration, the knowledge we have acquired by a 
very different process. It has not been observed in any modern 
literature, that persons devoted chiefly to grammatical studies are 
remarkable for any peculiar excellence, or even accuracy, of style, 
and the true method of attaining perfection in the use of English 
is the careful study of the actual practice of the best writers in 
the English tongue. 

" Another will say," argues Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence 
of Poesie, " that English wanteth grammar. Nay, truly, it hath 
that praise that it wants not grammar ; for grammar it might 
have, but needs it not, being so easie in itself e, and so void of those 
cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods and tenses, 
which I think was a piece of the tower of Babylon's curse, that a 
man should be put to schoole to learne his mother-tongue. But 
for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the minde, 
which is the ende of speech, that it hath equally with any other 
tongue in the world." The forms of English are so few, its syn- 
tax so simple, that they are learned by use before the age of com- 
mencing scholastic study, and what remains to be acquired be- 
longs rather to the department of rhetoric than of grammar. 
" Undoubtedly I have found," observes Sidney further, " in divers 
smal learned courtiers a more sound stile than in some possessors 
of learning ; of which I can ghesse no other cause, but that the 



particularly designed to fit their alumni to become professional instructors ? 
And would it not be well to employ for this purpose, not a mere technical 
grammarian and elocutionist, but rather some well-educated lady or gentleman 
accustomed to hear and to speak the best English from childhood, and whose 
duty it should be to correct the habitual daily language of the pupils ? These 
corrections should include not merely all grammatical errors, but also all those 
inelegancies of expression, of enunciation, and of intonation which are now 
seriously threatening to characterize our speech as a nation. 
* See post, Lecture xix. 



?8 ENGLISH GEAMMAE. [Lect. iv. 

courtier, following that which by practice he findeth fittest to na- 
ture, therein (though he know it not) doth according to art, 
though not ly art ; where the other using art to shew art, and 
not hide art, (as in these cases he should doe,) flieth from nature, 
and indeed abuseth art." * 

Upon questions of construction in inflected languages, where 
every thing depends on simple verbal form, appeal is made to the 
sense of sight if the period is written, to that of hearing if pro- 
nounced, and the meaning is often determined by no higher 
faculties than those concerned in the comparison of mere material 
and sensuous objects. In English, on the contrary, although we 
have fixed laws of position, yet as position does by no means 
necessarily conform to the order of thought, and nothing in the 
forms indicates the grammatical connection of the words, there is 
a constant intellectual effort to detect the purely logical relations 
of the constituents of the period, to consider the words in their 
essence not in their accidents, to divine the syntax from the sense, 
not infer it from casual endings, and hence it may be fairly said, 
that the construction and comprehension of an English sentence 
demand and suppose the exercise of higher mental powers than 
are required for the framing or understanding of a proposition in 
Latin. 

Nevertheless, a clear objective conception and comprehension 
of the general principles of syntax is very desirable, and this can 
hardly be obtained except by the presentation of them in a 
materialized, and, so to speak, visible shape. To the knowledge 
of grammar as a science, and therefore to a scientific comprehension 
of English grammar, as well as of the general principles of lan- 
guage, the study of some tongue organized with a gross and pal- 
pable machinery is requisite, and the laws of syntax must be illus- 
trated by exhibiting their application in a more tangible form 
than can be exemplified in a language so destitute of inflections, 
and so simple, and consequently so subtle, in its combinations as 
the English. 

This advantage, or, for it is very doubtful whether it is an ad- 

* The Greeks had a proverbial saying : ajiadearepov Qpaoov nai cacpecrepov, 
* speak less learnedly and plainer," which may well be applied to the style of 
most persons devoted to the study of grammar. 



Lect. IV.] GENERAL GRAMMAR. 79 

vantage to those who use the language possessing it, this con- 
venience rather, as an educational engine, is eminently character- 
istic of Latin. The vocabulary of the Latin is neither copious 
nor precise, its forms are intricate and inflexible, and its litera- 
ture, as compared with that of Greece, exhibits the inferiority 
which belongs to all imitative composition. But in the regularity, 
precision, and distinctness of its inflections and structure, it atones 
for much of the indefinite mistiness of its vocables, and it is an 
admirable linguistic machine for the manufacture of the coarser 
wares of intellectual produce and consumption. For the expres- 
sion of technicalities, the narration of marches and battles, the de- 
scription of sieges and slaughters, the enunciation of positive 
rules of pecuniary right, the promulgation of dictatorial ordi- 
nances and pontifical bulls, Latin is eminently fitted. Its words 

are always 

Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas ; 

and it is almost as much by the imperatorial character of the lan- 
guage itself — the speech of masters, not of men — as by the com- 
manding position of the people to whom it was vernacular, and 
of the church which sagaciously adopted it, that it has so power- 
fully influenced the development and the existing tendencies of 
all modern European tongues, even of those which have borrowed 
the fewest words from it.* 

* The power of Rome was a more widely diffused, pervading, and all-inform- 
ing element in the ancient world, than written history alone would authorize us 
to infer, and we find traces of her language, as well as amazing evidences of her 
material greatness and splendor, in provinces which we should scarcely other- 
wise know that her legions had overrun. Not Roman coins only, which com- 
merce might have borne farther than her eagles ever flew, but fortified camps, 
forums, roads, temples, inscriptions, throughout almost the whole Mediter- 
ranean basin as well as the Atlantic slope of the Eastern continent, everywhere 
attest her power ; while palaces, theatres, aqueducts, baths, buried statues and 
scattered gems, prove that her taste and luxury had spread from the banks of 
the Elbe to the sands of the Libyan Desert. The presence, however, of remains 
of the Latin language and of Roman art is not always to be regarded as proof 
of the actual subjugation of the countries where such relics are found. With 
the view partly of familiarizing those whose conquest she meditated with her 
laws, institutions, and manners, and thus preparing them for the yoke they 
were destined to wear, and partly of facilitating such conquests by demoraliz- 
ing the scions of royal and noble families, whose claim upon the loyal attach- 
ment of their people was one of the great barriers against the extension of her 



80 MCESO-GOTHIC. [Lect. iv. 

The Latin grammar has become a general standard, wherewith 
to compare that of all other languages, the medium through which 
all the nations of Christendom have become acquainted with the 
structure and the philosophy of their own ; and technical gram- 
mar, the mechanical combinations of language, can be nowhere 
else more advantageously studied. 

While then the study of Anglo-Saxon and of the older litera- 
ture of English itself promises the most abundant harvest of in- 
formation with respect to the etymology of the fundamental part 
of our present speech, and an inexhaustible mine of material for 
the further enrichment of our native tongue, we must, in spite of 
the close analogy between the syntax of primitive and modern 
English, and the great diversity between that of the latter and of 
Latin, still turn to the speech and literature of Home as the great 
source of scientific grammatical instruction. 

The Moeso-Gothic, both intrinsically and as being the earliest 
form in which considerable remains of any dialect cognate with 
our own have come down to us, is of much philological interest 
and importance. We have extant in Moeso-Gothic a large pro- 
portion of a translation of the gospels and epistles by Ulphilas, 
(a semi-Arian bishop of that nation in the fourth century,) por- 
tions of commentaries on different parts of the ISTew Testament, 
and some other less important fragments.* 

It is a point of dispute how far any of the later Teutonic dia- 
lects can claim direct descent from the Moeso-Gothic, but it is 
certain that it is very closely allied to all of them, and scarcely 
any modern Germanic forms are too diverse from that ancient 
tongue to have been derived from it. In variety of inflection 
and power of derivation and composition, in the possession of a 
dual and of certain passive forms, and in abundance of radical 

sway, it was the policy of Rome to train up at the capital, either as hostages 
or as national guests, as many foreign princes and other high-born youths as 
could he gathered from dependent and allied countries. Returning to their 
fatherland, they carried with them the speech, the arts, and often the artisans 
of their proud nurse, and thus many existing remains, of apparently Roman 
architecture, are doubtless imitations of Roman buildings, erected by native 
potentates who had acquired a taste for Roman life on the banks of the Tiber. 
* According to Stamm there once existed a translation of the whole of the 
t Qld Testament in that dialect. 



Lect. iv.] GOTHIC LANGUAGES. 81 

words which furnish an inexhaustible material for development 
and culture, the Mceso-Gothic bears a certain resemblance to the 
Greek ; while on the other hand, it is identified as a Germanic 
speech by the character of its radicals, almost all of which yet 
exist in the Teutonic languages, by its want of any verbal tenses 
but the present and the past, by the co-existence of a very com- 
plete system of vowel-changes in a strong, with a well-marked 
weak, order of inflection, and by general syntactical principles.* 

The Scandinavian languages, the Swedish and Danish, and 
especially their common mother the Icelandic or Old-Northern, 
the Frisic — which, in some of its great multitude of dialects, 
perhaps more than any other language, resembles the English — 
the Dutch, and the German, particularly in the Platt-Deutsch or 
Low German form, are all of great value to the thorough etymo- 
logical and grammatical study of our native tongue. 

They are important, not so much as having largely contributed 
to the vocabulary or greatly influenced the grammatical struc- 
ture of English, but because, in the poverty of accessible remains 
of Anglo-Saxon literature in different and especially in early 
stages of linguistic development, we do not possess satisfactory 
means of fully tracing the history of the Gothic portion of our 
language. There are very many English words and phrases 
whose forms show them to be Saxon, but which do not occur in 
Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. These may generally be explained or 
elucidated by reference to the sister-tongues, and consequently 
some knowledge of them is almost as useful to the English stu- 
dent as Anglo-Saxon itself. I should unhesitatingly place the 
Icelandic at the head of these subsidiary philologies, because, 
from its close relationship to Anglo-Saxon, it furnishes more 
abundant analogies for the illustration of obscure English ety- 
mological and syntactical forms than any other of the cognate 

* It is a question of curious interest whether those Crimean Goths, whom 
the Austrian ambassador, Busbequius, saw at Constantinople about the middle 
of the sixteenth century, and of whose vocabulary he has given us some scanty 
specimens in his fourth letter, were of Moeso-Gothic descent. It is difficult to 
account for their presence in that locality upon any other supposition, but the 
few words of their language left us by Busbequius do not enable us positively 
to determine to what branch of the Gothic stock their linguistic affinities 
would point. 

4* 



82 IMPORTANCE OF FRENCH. [Lect. rv. 

tongues.* It is but recently that the great value of Icelandic 
philology has become known to the other branches of the Gothic 
stock, and one familiar with the treasures of that remarkable 
literature, and the wealth, power, and flexibility of the language 
which embodies it, sees occasion to regret the want of a thorough 
knowledge of it in English and American grammatical writers, 
more frequently than of any other attainment whatever. 

French, of course, is of cardinal importance, both with refer- 
ence to the history of our grammatical inflections, and as having 
contributed, though chiefly as a conduit, much more largely to 
our vocabulary than any other foreign source. The English 
words usually referred to a Latin original, have, in a large major- 
ity of cases, come to us through the French, and we have taken 
them with the modifications of orthography and meaning which 
our Norman neighbors had impressed upon them. The syntax 
of English, in its best estate, has been little affected by French 
influence, and few grammatical combinations of Romance origin 
have been permanently approved and employed by good English 
writers. Every Gallicism in syntax is presumably a corruption ; 
but JSTorman French itself, as known to our ancestors, had been 
much modified by an infusion of the Scandinavian element, and 
therefore, forms of speech which we have borrowed from the 
French are sometimes referable, in the last resort, to a Gothic 
source. 

I cannot speak of even Greek as being of any such value, in 

* English philologists formerly ascribed perhaps too much to the Scandina- 
vian Gothic as an element in the structure and composition of Anglo-Saxon, 
and more recent inquirers have erred as widely, in denying that early Eng- 
lish was sensibly modified by the same influence. The dialects of Northern 
England, where the population partakes in greater proportion of Danish 
blood, show a large infusion of Scandinavian words and forms, and many 
of these have become incorporated into the general speech of Britain. The 
written Anglo-Saxon and Old-Northern certainly do not resemble each other 
so closely as to render it probable that they could have been mutually intel- 
ligible to those who spoke them ; and we find that by the old Icelandic law 
the representatives of Englishmen dying in Iceland were expressly excluded 
from the right of inheritance, as foreigners, of an unknown speech, p e i r 
menn er menn kunna eigi h £ r mali e$r tiingu viS. At the 
same time, it appears abundantly from the sagas that the Old-Northern was 
well understood among the higher circles in England, and the Icelandic 
skalds or bards were specially welcome at the English court. 



Lect. iv.] STUDY OF GEEEK. 83 

reference to English grammar or etymology, as to make its ac- 
quisition a well-spent labor, unless it is pursued for other pur- 
poses than those of domestic philology. But that I may not be 
misunderstood, let me repeat that, so far from dissuadiug from 
the study of Greek as a branch of general education, I do but 
echo the universal opinion of all persons competent to pronounce 
on the subject, in expressing my own conviction that the lan- 
guage and literature of ancient Greece constitute the most effi- 
cient instrument of mental training ever enjoyed by man ; and 
that a familiarity with that wonderful speech, its poetry, its phi- 
losophy, its eloquence, and the history it embalms, is incompara- 
bly the most valuable of intellectual possessions. The grammar 
of the Greek lan^uao-e is much more flexible, more tolerant of 
aberration, less rigid in its requirements, than the Latin. The 
varium et mutabile semper femina, of the Latin 
poet, for example, is so rare an instance of apparent want of 
concord, that it startles us as abnormal, while similar, and even 
wider grammatical discrepancies, are of constant occurrence in 
Greek. The precision which the regularity of Latin syntax 
gives to a period, the Greek more completely and clearly accom- 
plishes by the nicety with which individual words are defined in 
meaning ; and while the Latin trains us to be good grammarians, 
the Greek elevates us to the highest dignity of manhood, by mak- 
ing us acute and powerful thinkers. 

Nothing could well have been more surprising than the dis- 
covery that the ancient Sanscrit exhibits unequivocal evidence of 
close relationship to the Greek and Latin, as well as to the mod- 
ern Romance and the Gothic languages, in both grammar and 
vocabulary, and these analogies have served to establish a general 
alliance between a great number of tongues formerly supposed to 
be wholly unrelated. When linguistic science shall be farther 
advanced, the Sanscrit will probably in a great measure supersede 
the Latin as the common standard of grammatical comparison 
among the European tongues, with the additional advantage of 
standing much more nearly in one relation both to the Gothic 
and the Eomance dialects. But at present, Sanscrit is accessible 
only to the fewest, and the English student can hardly be advised, 
as a general rule, to look beyond the sources from which our ma- 
ternal speech is directly derived, for illustrations either of its 



84 ANCIENT SANSCRIT. [Lect. rv 

grammar or vocabulary. With respect to verbal forms, and 
points of grammatical structure not sufficiently explained by An- 
glo-Saxon, Latin, and French inflection and syntax, it may in 
general be said, that any one of the Gothic dialects will supply 
the deficiency, and if the inquirer's objects be limited to the 
actual use of his own tongue, the study of English authors is a 
better and safer guide than any wider researches in foreign phi- 
lologies.* 

* The American Senate and Bar have in my time been illustrated by four 
distinguished orators, all exceedingly remarkable, not only for argumentative 
and rhetorical power, but for an apparently exhaustive command of the ut- 
most resources of their native tongue, which was with them all a never-ceas- 
ing subject of most careful study. They were all fair classical scholars, and 
all more or less acquainted with contemporaneous European literature, though 
I have reason to believe that not one of them was able to speak any language 
but his mother-tongue. I can hardly imagine that any amount of foreign lin- 
guistic study could have enabled either of them to use the speech of his fire- 
side with more consummate mastery, or that the English tongue could ever 
be spoken with more graceful, persuasive, or majestic accents. 



LECTUKE V. 

STUDY OF EAELT ENGLISH. 

The systematic study of the mother-tongue, like that of all 
branches of knowledge which we acquire, to a sufficient extent 
for ordinary practical purposes, without study, is naturally very 
generally neglected. It is but lately that the English language has 
formed a part of the regular course of instruction at any of our 
higher seminaries, nor has it been made the subject of as zealous 
and thorough philological investigation by professed scholars, as 
have the German, the French, and some other living languages. It 
is a matter of doubt how far we are aided in acquiring the mastery 
of any spoken tongue by the study of scientific treatises ; but 
however this may be, it is only very recently that we have had 
any really scientific treatises on the subject, any grammar which 
has attempted to serve at once as a philosophical exposition of the 
principles, and a guide to the actual employment of the English 
tongue. The complete history of the language, — the characteri- 
zation of its periods, the critical elucidation of its successive 
changes, the full exhibition of its immediate and certain foreign 
relations as distinguished from its remote and presumptive affini- 
ties, — has never, to my knowledge, been undertaken.* While, 
therefore, for class instruction, and for many purposes of private 
study, there is no lack of text-books and other critical helps, yet a 
historical knowledge of English must be acquired by observing 

* I am certainly not blind to the great importance and utility of the- works 
of Latham, Fowler, Brown, and other learned and laborious inquirers into the 
facts and theory of English Grammar ; but the consideration of their merits 
does not come within the scope of these lectures, the object of which is to rec- 
ommend and enforce the study of English, not at second hand or through the 
medium of precept, but by a direct acquaictance with the great monuments of 
its literature. 

(85) 



86 DIFFICULTY OF ENGLISH. [Lect. v. 

its use and action as the living speech of the Anglican race in 
different centuries, not as its organization is demonstrated in the 
dissecting-room of the grammarian. 

English is generally reputed to be among the more difficult of 
the great European languages, but it is hard for a native to say 
how far this opinion is well founded. The comparison of our 
own tongue with a foreign speech is attended with a good deal of 
difficulty. Particular phrases and constructions, of course, are 
easily enough set off against each other, but the general move- 
ment of our maternal language is too much a matter of uncon- 
scious, spontaneous action to be easily made objective, and, on the 
other hand, in foreign tongues we are too much absorbed in the 
individual phenomena to be able to grasp the whole field. The 
enginery of the one is too near, the idiomatic motive power of 
the other too distant, for distinct vision. But I am inclined to 
the belief, that English is more difficult than most of the Conti- 
nental languages, at least as a spoken tongue, for I think it is cer- 
tain that fewer natives speak it with elegance and accuracy, if in- 
deed violations of grammatical propriety are not more frequent 
among the best English writers, and it sometimes happens that 
persons exact in the use of individual words are lax in the appli- 
cation of rules of syntactical construction. A distinguished 
British scholar of the last century said he had known but three 
of his countrymen who spoke their native language with uniform 
grammatical accuracy, and the observation of most persons widely 
acquainted with English and American society confirms the gen- 
eral truth implied in this declaration. Courier is equally severe 
upon the French. " There are," says that lively writer, " five or 
six persons in Europe who know Greek ; those who know French 
are much fewer." Prima facie, irregular as English is, we should 
expect it to be at least as correctly spoken as French, because the 
number of unrelated philological facts, of exceptions to what are 
said to be general rules, of anomalous and conventional phrases, 
is greater in the latter than in the former ; but the proportion of 
good speakers, or rather of good talkers, is certainly larger among 
the French than among the English or Americans. It is interesting 
to observe how much value has been attached to purity of dialect in 
some of the less known countries of Europe. The grand old 
Catalan chronicler, Ramon Muntaner, who wrote about the year 



Lect. v.] DEVELOPMENT OF MODEEN LANGUAGES. 87 

1325, himself no book-worm, but a veteran traineur de sabre, 
more than once concludes his euloginms of his heroes with a com- 
pliment to the propriety and elegance with which they spoke his 
native tongue, and he gives an interesting account of the means 
by which two of the nobility arrived at such perfection of speech. 
" And this same Syr Corral Llanca grew up one of the fayrest 
menne in the world, and best langaged and sagest, insomuch that 
as at that tyme menne saide, the finest Cathalan in the worlde was 
hys and Syr Roger de Luria's ; and no mervaile, for as yee have 
harde before, they came ryght yonge into Cathalonye and were 
norysshed there, and in alle the good townes of Cathalonie and of 
the reaume of Yalence whatsoever seemed to them choyce and 
faire langage, they dyd their endeavoure to learne the same. And 
so eche of hem was a more parfyt Cathalonian than alle other, 
and spake the fayrest Cathalan." * 

The systematic cultivation of the modern Continental languages 
began much earlier than that of English. They had generally 
advanced to a high degree of development, and acquired the 
characteristic grammatical features which now distinguish them, 
at a period when even the most polished of the English dialects 
was but a patois. Several of them indeed had produced original 
works in both poetry and prose, which still rank among the 
master-pieces of modern genius, before Anglo-Norman England 
had given birth to a single composition which yet maintains an 
acknowledged place in the literature of the nation. Although 
Icelandic can hardly be called a modern language, yet it possesses, 
besides the poems and traditions of the heathen era, an original 
modern literature modified by the same general Christian influ- 

* "E aquest En Corral Llanca exi hu dells bells homens del nion, e mills 
parlant e pus saui, si que en aquell temps se deya, quel pus bell cathalanesch 
del mon era dell e del dit En Roger de Luria ; e no era marauella, que ells, 
axi com dauant vos lie dit, vengren molt fadrins en Cathalunya, e nudrirense 
de cascum lloch de Cathalunya e del regne de Valencia tot 90 que bo ne bell 
parlar los paria ells aprengueren. E axi cascu dells fo lo pus perfet Cathala 
que negun altre, e ab pus bell cathalanesch." — Ramon Muntaner, 1562, cap. 
xviii. 

The Catalan En, W, Na. the equivalent of the Castilian Don, Dona, and of 
the English Sir, Madam, is of disputed etymology, some holding it to be a 
mere locative particle corresponding to the French Be, others, and I think 
with greater probability, considering it a remnant of the Latin Senior. 



88 DEVELOPMENT OF MODEKN LANGUAGES. [Lect. v. 

ences which, have colored all the recent mental efforts of Europe. 
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced in that remote 
island poems of remarkable merit, and prose compositions which 
have no superiors in the narrative literature of any age. The 
ISTibelungen Lied, the great epic of Germany, dates probably as 
far back as the year twelve hundred. Castilian, Catalan, Pro- 
venzal, and French genius had already embodied themselves in 
poetic forms, which determined the character of the subsequent 
literatures of those languages, before the close of the thirteenth 
century, and the commencement of the fourteenth was marked by 
the appearance of Dante's great work, which still stands almost 
alone in the poetry, not of Italy only, but of modern Europe. 

The later origin of English literature is to be ascribed partly 
to the fact that England, from its insular position, was less open 
to the exciting causes which roused to action the intellect of the 
continent, but chiefly, no doubt, to the condition of the language 
itself. The tongues of Iceland, of Germany, of Italy, of Spain, 
and in a less degree of France also, were substantially homo- 
geneous in their etymology and structure, and the separate dia- 
lects of each stock, Gothic and Romance, were closely enough 
allied to facilitate the study of all of them to those to whom any 
one was vernacular, and thus to secure to them a great reciprocal 
philological and literary influence. . The conn tries to which they 
belonged were also territorially and politically more or less con- 
nected, and thus an unbroken chain of social and literary action 
and reaction extended from the Arctic ocean to the Mediterra- 
nean. 

English, on the contrary, was not only a composite speech, but 
built up of very discordant ingredients, and spoken in an isolated 
locality. The British islands had no relations of commerce or 
politics with any countries except Northern and Western France, 
Spain, and the comparatively unimportant Netherlandish prov- 
inces.* A longer period was naturally required for the assimilation 

* The fear of wearying my audience by too frequent references to unfami- 
liar, foreign philologies, led me to omit to draw the special attention of my 
hearers to one of the richest sources of collateral illustration of early Eng- 
lish. I mean the languages and literature of the Low Countries — Dutch and 
Flemish, (now become one by the adoption of a common orthography,) Frisic, 
and their numerous dialects. These languages, especially in their mediaeval 



Lect. v.] DEVELOPMENT OE ENGLISH. 89 

of the constituents of the language, and for the action of the in- 
fluences which, before that assimilation was completed, had already 
created the literatures of the Continental nations. In a country 
ruled by Norman princes, all governmental and aristocratic in- 
fluences were unfavorable to the cultivation of the native speech 
and the growth of a national literature. The Romish church, too, 
in England as everywhere else, was hostile to all intellectual effort 
which in any degree diverged from the path marked out by eccle- 
siastical habit and tradition, and very many important English 
benefices were held by foreign priests quite ignorant of the English 
tongue. Robert of G-loucester, who flourished about two hundred 
years after the conquest, says : 

Wyllani, pys noble due, po lie adde ydo al pys, 

f>en wey he nome to Londone he & al hys 

As kyng & prince of lond, wyp nobleye ynou. 

Agen hym wyp vayre processyon pat folc of town drou, 

And vnderuonge hym vayre ynou, as kyng of pys lond. 

pus come lo ! Engelond into Normannes honde, 

And pe Normans ne coupe speke po bote her owe speche, 

And speke French as dude atom & here chyldren dude al so teche. 

So pat heymen of pys lond, pat of her blod come, 

Holdep alle pulke speche, pat hii of hem nome. 

Vor bote a man coupe French, me tolp of hym wel lute. 

Ac lowe men holdep to Englyss, & to her kunde speche yute. 

Ich wene per ne be man in world contreyes none, 

pat ne holdep to her kunde speche, bote Engelond one, 

Ac wol me wot vorto conne bothe wel yt ys 

Vor pe more pat a man con, pe more worp he ys.* 

And in the following century, as we learn from an old chronicler, 
" John Cornewaile, a maister of grammar, changed the lore in 
grammar scole, and construction, of Frenche into Englische : so 
that now, the year of our Lord a thousand three hundred and 4 
•score and five, and of the seconde Kyng Richard after the con- 
quest nyne, in alle the grammar scoles of Engelond children lev- 
eth Frensche, and construeth and lerneth on Englische." 

forms, have long been a favorite study with me, and constitute an almost 
unwrought mine of valuable information respecting the early history of our 
own tongue. English students have hitherto almost wholly neglected Neth- 
erlandish literature and philology, and even the more Catholic scholarship 
of Germany bas generally treated them with indifference if not with con- 
tempt. 

* Robert of Gloucester, p. 364. 



90 DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH. [Lect. V. 

Under such circumstances, it is by no means strange that the 
progress of the language and literature of England should have 
been slow, and it is matter of surprise that the fourteenth century 
should have left so noble monuments of English genius, rather 
than that the literary memorials of that era should be so few. 
But, although the long reign of Edward III. was as remarkable for 
the splendid first-fruits of a great national literature as for its 
political and martial triumphs and reverses, the language was not 
at that time sufficiently cleared of dialectic confusion, and suffi- 
ciently settled in its forms and syntax, to admit of grammatical 
and critical treatment as a distinctly organized speech. While, 
therefore, the thirteenth century produced in Iceland a learned 
and complete treatise on the poetic art as suited to the genius of 
the Old-Northern tongue,* and Jacme March, a contemporary of 
Chaucer, had composed a Catalan vocabulary and dictionary of 
rhymes, with metrical precepts and examples, the English had 
not even a dictionary or grammar, still less critical treatises, until 
a much later period. It will be evident from all this, that the 
remains of the English speech, in its earliest forms, as a literary 
medium, must be relatively few, and that it is by no means easy to 
trace the progress of changes which ended in the substitution of 
our present piebald dialect for the comparatively homogeneous 
and consistent Saxon tongue. A language which exists, for cen- 
turies, only as the jargon of an unlettered peasantry and a de- 
pised race, will preserve but few memorials of its ages of humilia- 
tion, and as I have before noticed, the indifference with which 
English philology has hitherto been so generally regarded has 
suffered to perish, or still withholds from the public eye, a vast 
amount of material which might have been employed for the 
elucidation of many points of great historical, literary, and lin- 
guistic interest. Halliwell's Dictionary, containing more than« 
fifty thousand archaic and provincial words and obsolete forms, 
is illustrated with citations drawn in the largest proportion from 
unpublished manuscript authorities, and it is evident from the 
titles of the works quoted and the character of the extracts, as 
well as from the testimony of scholars, that many of them must 
be of very great philological value, f 

* The prose Edda, or Edda of Snorri Sturluson. 
f Until very lately, the modernization of every reprint of an English classic 



Lect. v.] VOCABULAEY OF ENGLISH. 91 

I have already sufficiently stated my reasons for believing that 
a colloquial or grammatical knowledge of other tongues is not es- 
sential to the comprehension and use of our own, and, considered 
solely as a means to that end, without reference to the immense 
value of classical and modern Continental literature as the most 
powerful of all instruments of general culture, I have no doubt 
whatever that the study of the Greek and Latin languages might 
be advantageously replaced by that of the Anglo-Saxon and prim- 
itive English. An overwhelming proportion of the words which 
make up our daily speech is drawn from Anglo-Saxon roots, and 
our syntax is as distinctly and as generally to be traced to the 

was almost as much a settled practice as the adoption of a fashionable style 
of binding. Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth have not scrupled to lay a pro- 
fane hand upon Chaucer, a mightier genius than either ; and Milton is not 
allowed to appear in the orthography which he deliberately and systematically 
employed. Archbishop Parker was so zealous for the preservation, or rather 
the restoration, of ancient forms, that he printed even the Latin of Asser's 
life of Alfred in the Anglo-Saxon character. The Association which takes its 
name from Parker, in republishing the English theological writings of the 
sixteenth century — a series extending to more than fifty volumes, and which, 
unmutilated, would have been invaluable as a treasure of genuine, primitive, 
nervous English — has clipped and restamped the whole in such a manner as 
to deprive these works of all their interest, except for professional theological 
inquirers, and very greatly to diminish their value even for them. The re- 
cently discovered manuscript of the Earl of Devonshire's translation of Pa- 
leario's Treatise on the Benefits of Christ's Death is evidently a copy made by 
an ignorant transcriber, and its orthography is extremely incorrect and varia- 
ble. In preparing it for the press, it was, unfortunately, deemed expedient 
to reform the spelling, for the sake of making it more uniform and intelli- 
gible as well as more correct, and the task has been executed with great care, 
and in as good faith as the erroneous principle adopted would admit of. 
As a frontispiece, a fac-simile of one of the very small pages of the manu- 
script is given, containing eighteen lines, or about one hundred and twenty- 
five words. In printing the text of this page, the editor has omitted a comma 
in the seventh line, and thereby changed, or at least obscured, the meaning 
of a very important and very clear passage which contained the marrow of the 
whole treatise. Of course, any departure from the letter in a weighty period, 
unless it is supposed to be a mere typographical accident, destroys the confi- 
dence of critical readers in the edition, and the book, in a grammatical point 
of view, becomes worthless. The manuscript in question is one of the most 
important recent acquisitions to the theology of the Reformation and the 
early literature of England, and the voluntary admission of any changes in 
its text shows a want of exact scholarship in a quarter where we had the best 
right to expect it. 



92 FOKMS OF EAELT ENGLISH. [Lect. v. 

same source. We are not then to regard the ancient Anglican 
speech as in any sense a foreign tongue, but rather as a chrysalis 
form of our own, wherein we may find direct and clear explana- 
tion of many grammatical peculiarities of modern English, which 
the study of the Continental languages, ancient or modern, can 
but imperfectly elucidate. With reference to etymology, the im- 
portance of Anglo-Saxon is too obvious to require argument. It 
is fair to admit, however, that the etymology of compound words, 
and of abstract and figurative terms, must in general be sought 
elsewhere ; for we have borrowed our scientific, metaphysical, and 
sesthetical phraseology from other sources, while the vocabulary 
of our material life is almost wholly of native growth. In deter- 
mining the signification of words, modern usage is as binding an 
authority as ancient practice, inasmuch as, at present, we know no 
ground but use for either the old meaning or the new; but a 
knowledge of the primitive sense of a word very often enables us 
to discover a force and fitness in its modern applications which we 
had never suspected before, and accordingly to employ it with greater 
propriety and appositeness. The most instructive and impressive 
etymologies are those which are pursued within the limits of our 
own tongue. The native word at every change of form and 
meaning exhibits new domestic relations, and suggests a hundred 
sources of collateral inquiry and illustration, while the foreign 
root connects itself with our philology only by remote and often 
doubtful analogies, and when it enters our language, it comes usu- 
ally in a fixed form, and with a settled meaning, neither of 
which admits of further development, and of course the word has 
no longer a history. 

The knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is important as a corrective of 
the philological errors into which we may be led by the study of 
early English, and especially of popular ballad and other poetry, 
without such a guide. The introduction of Norman French, with 
a multitude of words inflected in the weak or augmentative manner, 
naturally confused what was sufficiently intricate and uncertain 
before, namely, the strong inflection, or that by letter-change, in 
the Anglo-Saxon. The range of letter-change in Anglo-Saxon 
grammar was indeed wide, but not unlimited or arbitrary. It 
however became so, at least in the poetic dialect, as soon as Nor- 
man influence had taught English bards independence of the laws 



Lect. v.] eokms of eaely English. 93 

of Saxon grammar. Many of the barbarous forms so freely used 
in popular verse are neither obsolete conjugations revived, nor 
dialectic peculiarities, but creations of the rhymesters who em- 
ployed them, coin not uncurrent merely, by counterfeit, and with- 
out either the stamp or the ring of the genuine metal. The bal- 
ladmongers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries concerned 
themselves as little about a vowel as the Orientals, and where the 
convenience of rhyme or metre required a heroic license, they 
needed only the consonants of one syllable of a genuine root as a 
stock whereon to grow any conceivable variety of termination.* 
Although they did not hesitate to conjugate a weak verb with a 
strong inflection, or to reverse the process, thus adding or sub- 
tracting syllables at pleasure, yet their boldest liberties were with 
the letter-change in the strong inflection. We cannot indeed hold 
them guilty of corrupting 

the language of the nation 
With long-tailed words in -osity and -ation ; 

but we can fairly convict them of making it more desperately 
Gothic in its forms than even the Mceso-Gothic of Ulphilas. 

The contusion into which the English inflections were thus 
thrown combined with other circumstances to discourage the 
attempts of philologists to reduce its accidence to a regular sys- 
tem, and English scholars had shown very respectable ability in 
the elucidation of other tongues, before they produced any thing 
that could fairly be called a grammar of their own. Analogous 
causes had prevented the cultivation of native philology in North- 
ern France, and though the langue d'oc, or Provenzal, was 
early a matter of careful study, the langue d'oil, the only 

* If it were not irreverent in an American to present even the boy-life of 
Washington in a ludicrous or familiar light, I would refer to the Harvard po 
etical version of Weems's story of the Cherry-tree, as a fair and scarcely exag- 
gerated imitation of the verbal extravagances of early English and Scottish 
ballad-makers. The vowel changes, guv for gave, sin for son, Washingtfm for 
Washington, are made for the sake of rhyme and not in accordance with any 
phonetic law, and they may all be paralleled in genuine old ballads that have 
been quoted as evidences of the condition of the vernacular English language 
two or three centuries since. They are, for the most part, mere poetical li- 
censes which belong to the category of expressions lege solutis. 



94: FOKMS OF EAELY ENGLISH. [Lect. v. 

French dialect known to the Norman race, possessed no grammar 
until it was provided with one by an Englishman.* 

The function of grammar is to teach what ib, not what the gram- 
marian thinks ought to be, the best usage in language. English, 
as I have said, was too irregular fluctuating, and incongruous in its 
accidence and syntax to be reduced to form and order until the 
close of the sixteenth century, and as its literature was of later 
origin than that of the continent there was not, before that period, 
a sufficient accumulation of classical authorship to serve as illus- 
tration and authority in grammatical discussion.f 

* The Frencli grammar of Palsgrave, to which I allude, prepared for the use 
of the Princess Mary, sister of King Henry VIII., and printed in 1530, under 
the title of Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse, is, under the circum- 
stances, the most remarkable, if not the most important, work which had ap- 
peared in modern philology before the commencement of the present century. 
Although it was designed only to teach French grammar, yet, as it is written 
in English, and constantly illustrates the former tongue by comparison with 
the latter, it is hardly a less valuable source of instruction with reference to the 
native than to the foreign language. In the careful reprint lately executed at 
the expense of the French government, it makes a large quarto of 900 pp., 
more than half of which is occupied with comparative tables of words and 
phrases, so that while it is a remarkably complete French grammar, it is much 
the fullest English dictionary which existed before the time of Elizabeth. It 
is also one of the amplest collections of English phrases and syntactical com- 
binations which can be found at the present day, and at the same time the best 
authority now extant for the pronunciation used in French, and, so far it goes, 
in English also, at the period when it was written. 

f One of the earliest English grammars which can lay claim to scientific 
merit is the brief compend drawn up by Ben Jonson, and published some time 
after the death of the author. It is too meagre to convey much positive in- 
struction, but it exhibits enough of philological insight to excite serious regret 
for the loss of Jonson's complete work, the manuscript of which was destroyed 
by fire. This little treatise throws a good deal of light on the orthoepy of 
English at that period, for the learning and the habitual occupations of Jon- 
son make it authoritative on this point, so far as it goes, but there are state- 
ments concerning the accidence, which are not supported by the general usage 
of the best authors, either of Jonson's own time, or of any preceding age of 
English literature. For instance, he lays down the rule that nouns in z, s, sh, 
g, and ch, make the possessive singular in is, and the plural in es, and as an ex- 
ample he cites the word prince, (which, by the way, does not end in either of 
the terminations enumerated by him,) and says the possessive case is princes, 
the plural princes. That individual instances of this orthography may be met 
with, I do not deny, but it is certain that it never was the general usage, and 
Jonson was doubtless suggesting a theory, not declaring a fact, and he intro- 
duces the rule rather as furnishing an explanation of what he calls the " mon- 



LECT. v.] DIFFICULTIES OF EARLY ENGLISH. 95 

The same reasons wliich deterred early English scholars from 
laying down rules of grammatical inflection, would render it im- 
possible at the present day to construct a regular accidence of the 
forms of the language at any period before the writers of the 
Elizabethan age had established standards of conjugation, declen- 
sion, orthography, and syntax. The English student therefore 
can expect little help from grammarians in mastering the litera- 
ture of earlier periods, and he must learn the system of each great 
writer by observation of his practice. But the inflections in Eng- 
lish are so few, that the number of possible variations in their 
form is embraced witlrin a very narrow range, and all their dis- 
crepancies together do not amount to so great a number as the 
regular changes in most other languages. With respect to the 
vocabulary, the difficulties are even less. Most good editions of 
old authors are provided with glossaries explaining the obsolete 
words, and where these are wanting, the dictionaries of Nares, 
Halliwell, Wright, and others, amply supply the deficiency. In 
fact, a mere fraction of the time demanded to acquire the most 
superficial smattering of French or Italian will enable the student 
to obtain such a knowledge of early English, that he can read with 
f acility every thing written in the language, from the period when 
it assumed a distinct form to its complete development in the 
seventeenth century. Full critical discussions of the literary 

strous syntax," of using the pronoun his as the sign of the possessive case, than 
as a guide to actual practice. 

It is curious that Palsgrave lays down the same rule, though he elsewhere 
contradicts it, and in practice disregards it. ' ' Also where as we seme to have 
a genity ve case, for so moche as, by adding of is to a substantyve, we sygnifye 
possessyon, as, my maistem gowne, my ladyz's boke, which with us contrevail- 
leth as moche as the gowne of my maister, the boke of myladye," etc. Intro- 
duction, XL. 

But on page 191, he says : 

" Where we, in our tonge, use to putte s to oure substantyves whan we wyll 
express possessyon, saying, 'a mannes gowne, a woman [s] hose/ etc., etc., 
and afterwards, ' this is my maiste?'* gowne, he dyd fette his maisters cloke.' " 
A similar passage occurs on page 141, and I have not observed a single in- 
stance where Palsgrave himself makes the possessive in is, except that above 
quoted from page XL., where it is used by way of exemplifying the rule as he 
states it. 

Alexander Gil's remarkable Logonomia Anglica is interesting rather in an 
orthoepical, than in a grammatical point of view, and it will be particularly 
noticed in a Lecture on orthoepical changes in English, post. 



96 EAELY ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. [Lect. v. 

• 
merit of English authors would be foreign to the plan of the 
present course, and in noticing writers of different periods, I shall 
refer chiefly to their value as sources of philological instruction. 
First in time, and not least in importance, is the Ormulum, a very- 
good edition of which was published in 1852. This is a metrical 
paraphrase of a part of the New Testament, in a homiletic form, 
and it probably belongs to the early part of the thirteenth century. 
Its merit consists mainly in the purity of its Saxon-English, very 
few words of foreign origin occurring in it. The uniformity of 
its orthography, and the regularity of its inflections, are far greater 
than are to be found in the poetical compositions even of the best 
writers of the succeeding century. One reason of this is that the 
unrhymed versification adopted by the author relieved him from 
the necessity of varying the terminal syllables of his words for the 
sake of rhyme, which led to such anomalous inflections in other 
poetical compositions, and it accordingly- exhibits the language in 
the most perfect form of which it was then capable. In fact, the 
dialect of the Ormulum is more easily mastered than that of Piers 
Ploughman, which was written more than a century later, and it 
contains fewer words of unknown or doubtful signification. It is, 
moreover, especially interesting as a specimen of the character 
and inherent tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon language as affected 
by more advanced civilization and culture, but still uncorrupted 
by any considerable mixture of foreign ingredients ; for we dis- 
cover no traces of the Norman element in the vocabulary, and but 
few in the syntax of this remarkable work.* Piers Ploughman, 
on the contrary, employs Latin and French words in quite as 
large a proportion as Chaucer, f although the forms and syntax of 
the latter author are much nearer the modern standard. The 
compliment which Spenser bestows upon Chaucer's "Well of 
English undefiled " is indeed well merited, if reference is had to 

* The vocabulary of the Ormulum consists of about twenty-three hundred 
words, exclusive of proper names and inflected forms. Among these I am 
unable to find a single word of Norman-French origin, and scarcely ten which 
were taken directly from the Latin. The whole number of words of foreign 
etymology previously introduced into Anglo-Saxon, which occur in the Ormu- 
lum, does not exceed sixty, though there is some uncertainty as to the origin 
of several words common to the Latin and the Gothic languages in the earliest 
stages in which these latter are known to us. — See Lecture vi. 

f See Lecture vi. 



Lect. v.] EAKLY ENGLISH LITERATUKE. 97 

the composite character that English assumed in the best ages of 
its literature, but it would be more fitly applied to the Ormulum, 
as a repository of the indigenous vocabulary of the Anglican 
tongue. In any event, no student of the works of Chaucer will 
dispute Spenser's opinion that 

" In him the pure well-head of poesy did dwell," 

and it is no extravagant praise to say that the name of Chaucer 
was the first in English literature, until it was, not eclipsed, but 
surpassed by those of Shakespeare and Milton. * 

In the earliest ages of all literature, poetry seems to be little 
more than an artificial arrangement of the dialect of common life, 
but as literary culture advances, both the phraseology and the 
grammar of metrical compositions diverge from the vulgar speech, 
and poetry forms a vocabulary and a syntax of its own. Although, 
therefore, the practice of great poetical writers is authority for 
their successors, yet it is by no means trustworthy evidence as to 
the actual character of the language employed by speakers or 
prose writers, f and this is more emphatically true of the English 
than of most Continental languages, in consequence of the de- 
rangement of its Sectional system which I have already noticed. 

The dialect of Chaucer doubtless approaches to the court lan- 
guage of his day, but the prose of Wycliffe is more nearly the 
familiar speech of the English heart in the reign of Edward III., 
and the pages of Holinshed more truly reflect the living language 
of Queen Elizabeth's time than do the stanzas of Spenser. 

The English prose literature of the fifteenth century consists, in 
large proportion, of translations, and these always partake more or 
less of the color of the sources from which they were taken. 
There is, in fact, so little native English of that period extant in 
a printed form, that it is not easy to determine how far the prev- 
alence of Gallicisms in the translations printed by Caxton is to be 

* I am aware that Chaucer's poems are in great part translations, paraphrases, 
or imitations. But this was the habit of the time. Every man built on the 
foundation of his predecessors, and Chaucer, while he touched nothing which 
he did not improve, is always best when he is most original in the conception 
as well as the treatment of his theme. 

t Nos consuetudine [loquendi] prohibemui ; poeta jus suum tenuit et 
dixit audacius. Cicero, Tusc. Disp. III. 9. 
5 



98 ENGLISH OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. [Lect. v. 

ascribed to the influence of French originals upon the style of the 
translator, and how far it was a characteristic feature of the lan- 
guage of the time. The same remark applies, though with much 
less force, to Lord Berners' admirable translation of Froissart, the 
two volumes of which were published in 1523 and 1525 respect- 
ively; but this translation is doubtless the best English prose 
style which had yet appeared, and as a specimen of picturesque 
narrative, it is excelled by no production of later periods. The 
dramatic character and familiar gossipping tone of the original 
allowed some license of translation, and the dialogistic style of the 
English of Lord Berners is as racy, and nearly as idiomatic, as the 
French of Froissart. 

Tyndale's- translation of the New Testament is the most import- 
ant philological monument of the first half of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, perhaps I should say of the whole period between Chaucer 
and Shakespeare, both as a historical relic and as having, more 
than any thing else, contributed to shape and Hx the sacred dia- 
lect and to establish the form which the Bible must permanently 
assume in an English dress. The best features of the translation 
of 1611 are derived from the version of Tyndale, and thus that 
remarkable work has exerted, directly and indirectly, a more 
powerful influence on the English language than any other single 
production between the ages of Richard II. and Queen Elizabeth.* 

The most important remaining prose works of the sixteenth 
century are the writings of Sir Thomas More,f (which, however, 
with all their excellence, are rather specimens of what the lan- 
guage in its best estate then was, than actually influential models 
of composition,) and those of Hooker. These last, indeed, are 
not remarkable as originating new forms or combinations of 
words, but they embody nearly all the real improvements which 
had been made, and they may be considered as exhibiting a 
structure of English not equalled by the style of any earlier 
writer, and scarcely surpassed by that of any later. 

I shall reserve what I have to say upon the dialect of the au- 
thorized English version of the Bible for another occasion, and it 
would be superfluous to commend to the study of the inquirer 
such authors as Bacon, and Shakespeare, and Milton. There are, 

* See Lecture xxviii. f See Lecture vi. 



Lect. v.] ENGLISH OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 99 

however, two or three classes of writers of the sixteenth and sev- 
enteenth centuries, whose works are much less known than their 
philological importance deserves. First, are what we must call, 
in relation to Shakespeare, and only in relation to him, the minor 
dramatists of the period in question. They are valuable, not only 
as perhaps the best authorities upon the actual spoken dialect of 
their age, but as genuine expressions of the character and tenden- 
cies of contemporaneous English humanity, and also for the aid 
they afford in the illustration and elucidation of Shakespeare him- 
self, whose splendor has so completely filled the horizon of his 
art, that those feebler lights can hardly yet be said to have en- 
joyed the benefit of a heliacal rising. 

Next come the early English translators of the great monu- 
ments of Greek and Roman literature. The reigns of Elizabeth 
and James produced a. large number of translations of classical 
authors, as for example the Lives and the Morals of Plutarch, the 
Works of Seneca, the History of Livy, the Natural History of 
the Elder Pliny, and other voluminous works. These transla- 
tions are naturally more or less tinctured with un-English classi- 
cal idioms, but the vast range of subjects discussed in them, es- 
pecially in Plutarch and Pliny, demanded the employment of al- 
most the entire native vocabulary, and we find in these works 
exemplifications of numerous words and phrases which scarcely 
occur at all in any other branch of the literature of that important 
period. 

For the same reasons, the early voyages and travels, such as 
the voluminous collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, as well as 
the separately published works of this class are very valuable 
sources of philological knowledge. Their vocabularies are 
very varied and extensive, and they are rendered especially 
attractive by the life and fervor which, at a period when all 
that was foreign to Europe was full of wonder and mystery, 
clothed in almost poetic forms the narratives of events, and 
descriptions of scenery and objects, now almost too familiar to 
excite a momentary curiosity. Hakluyt is perhaps to be prefer- 
red to Purchas, because he allows the narrators whose reports he 
collected to speak for themselves, and appears in general to follow 
the words of the original journals more closely than Purchas, who 
often abridges, or otherwise modifies, his authorities. 



100 ENGLISH OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY. [Lect. v. 

The theological productions of the period between the reigns 
of Elizabeth and Anne, however eloquent and powerful, are, 
simply as philological monuments, less important than the secu- 
lar compositions of the same century, and they furnish not many 
examples of verbal form or combination which are not even more 
happily employed elsewhere. To these remarks, however, the 
works of Fuller are an exception. Among the writers of that 
age, Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne come nearest to Shakespeare 
and Milton in affluence of thought and wealth of poetic senti- 
ment and imagery. They are both remarkable for a wide range 
of vocabulary, Fuller inclining to a Saxon, Browne to a Latinized 
diction, and their syntax is marked by the same peculiarities as 
their nomenclature. 

The interest which attaches to the literature of the eighteenth 
century is more properly of a critical and rhetorical than of a 
linguistic character ; and, besides, in remarks which are intended 
to draw the attention of my hearers to unfamiliar rather than to 
every-day fields of study, it would be unprofitable to discuss the 
literary importance of Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison, Johnson, 
Junius, Gibbon, and Burke. 

I must, for similar reasons, refrain from entering upon the 
literature of our own times, and I shall only refer to a single 
author, who has made himself conspicuous as, in certain particu- 
lars, an exceedingly exact and careful writer. In point of thor- 
ough knowledge of the meaning, and constant and scrupulous 
precision in the use, of individual words, I suppose Coleridge 
surpasses all other English writers of whatever period. His 
works are of great philological value, because they compel the 
reader to a minute study of his nomenclature, and a nice discrim- 
ination between words which he employs in allied, but still dis- 
tinct senses, and they contribute more powerfully than the works 
of any other English author to habituate the student to that close 
observation of the meaning of words which is essential to pre- 
cision of thought and accuracy of speech. Few writers so often 
refer to the etymology of words as a means of ascertaining, de- 
fining, or illustrating their meaning, while, at the same time, 
mere etymology was not sufficiently a passion with Coleridge to 
be likely to mislead him.* 

* Though Coleridge is a high authority with respect to the meaning of 



LECTUEE VI. 

SOURCES AND COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH. 



The heterogeneous character of our vocabulary, and the conse- 
quent obscurity of its etymology, have been noticed as circum- 
stances which impose upon the student of English an amount of la- 
bor not demanded for the attainment of languages whose stock of 
words is derived, in larger proportion, from obvious and familiar 
roots. I now propose to give some account of the sources and 
composition of the English language. According to the views of 
many able philologists, comparison of grammatical structure is a 
surer test of radical linguistic affinity, than resemblances between 
the words which compose vocabularies. I shall not here discuss 
the soundness of this doctrine, my present object being to display 
the acquisitions of the Anglican tongue, and to indicate the quar- 
ters from which they have been immediately derived, not to 
point out its ethnological relationships. I shall therefore on this 

single words, his style is by no means an agreeable or even a scrupulously 
correct one, in point of structure and syntax. Among other minor matters 
I shall notice hereafter (Lecture xxix.), his improper, or at least very ques- 
tionable, use of the phrase in respect of, and I will here observe, that in oppo- 
sition to the practice of almost every good writer from the Saxon period to 
his own, and to the rule given by Ben Jonson as well as all later gramma- 
rians, he employs the affirmative or after the negative alternative neither ; as 
neither this or that. In this innovation, he has had few if any followers. 
Again, he uses both, not exclusively as a dual, but as embracing three or 
more objects. I am aware that in this latter case he had the example of 
Ascham and some other early authors, but it is contrary to the etymological 
meaning of the word, and to the constant usage of the best English writers. 
I do not think that any of these departures from the established construction 
were accidental. They were attempts at arbitrary reform, and though the 
last of them may be defended on the ground that dual forms are purely 
grammatical subtleties, and ought to be discarded, they will all probably fail 
to secure general adoption in English syntax. 

(101) 



102 SOUKCES OF VOCABULAKY. [Lect. vt. 

occasion confine myself to the vocabulary, dismissing inqniry in- 
to the grammatical character of the language, with the simple re- 
mark, that it in general corresponds with that of the other dia- 
lects of the G-othic stock. In structure, English, though shorn 
of its inflections, is still substantially Anglo-Saxon, and it owes 
much the largest part of its words to the same source. 

There are two modes of estimating the relative amount of 
words derived from different sources in a given language. The 
one is to compute the etymological proportions of the entire 
vocabulary, as exhibited in the fullest dictionaries ; the other, to 
observe the proportions in which words of indigenous and of for- 
eign origin respectively occur in actual speech and in written lit- 
erature. Both modes of computation must be employed in order 
to arrive at a just appreciation of the vocabulary ; but, for ordi- 
nary purposes, the latter method is the most important, because 
words tend to carry their native syntax with them, and grammat- 
ical structure usually accords more nearly with that of the source 
from which the mass of the words in daily use is taken, than with 
the idiom of languages whose contributions to the speech are 
fewer in number and of rarer occurrence. Besides this, all dic- 
tionaries contain many words which are employed only in special 
or exceptional cases, and which may be regarded as foreign deni- 
zens not yet entitled to the rights of full citizenship. At the 
same time, the method in question is a very difficult mode of es- 
timation, because, not to speak of the peculiar diction of individ- 
ual writers, every subject, every profession, and to some extent, 
every locality, has its own nomenclature, and it is often impossible 
to decide how far those special vocabularies can claim to form a 
part of the general stock. 

Upon the whole, we may say that English, as understood and 
employed by the great majority of those who speak it, or, in other 
words, that portion of the language which is not restricted to par- 
ticular callings or places, but is common to all intelligent natives, 
is derived from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and French. Neither its 
vocabulary nor its structure possesses any important characteristic 
features which may not be traced directly to one of these sources, 
although the number of individual words which we have borrowed 
from other quarters is still very considerable.* Dean Trench 

* This general statement must be qualified by the admission that certain 



Lect. VI.] SOUECES OF VOCABULARY. 103 

makes this general estimate of the relative proportions between 
the different elements of English : " Suppose the English language 
to be divided into a hundred parts ; of these, to make a rough 
distribution, sixty would be Saxon, thirty would be Latin, includ- 
ing of course the Latin which has come to us through the French, 
five would be Greek ; we should then have assigned ninety-five 
parts, leaving the other five, perhaps too large a residue, to be di- 
vided among all the other languages, from which we have adopted 
isolated words." This estimate, of course, applies to the total 
vocabulary, as contained in the completest .dictionaries. Sharon 
Turner gives extracts from fifteen classical English authors, be- 
ginning with Shakespeare and ending with Johnson, for the pur- 
pose of comparing the proportion of Saxon words used by these 
authors respectively. These extracts have often been made a ba- 
sis for estimates of the proportion of English words in actual use 
derived from foreign sources, but they are by no means sufficient- 
ly extensive to furnish a safe criterion. The extracts consist of 
only a period or two from each author, and a few of them extend 
beyond a hundred words ; none of them, I believe, beyond a hun- 
dred and fifty. The results deduced from them are, as would be 
naturally supposed, erroneous ; but, such as they are, they have 
been too generally adopted to be passed without notice, and they 
are given in a note at the foot of the page.* In order to arrive 

grammatical forms adopted in Northern England from the Danish colonists 
passed into the literary dialect, and finally became established modes of speech 
in English. I have known one American family in which the Danish verb at 
lakke was in familiar use, and they commonly said ' it lacks towards ten o'clock,' 
for ' it is near ten o'clock,' which is precisely equivalent to the Danish det lak- 
ker mod ti. The family could give no explanation of the origin of the phrase. 
* The most convenient and intelligible method of stating the results is by the 
numerical percentage of words from different sources in the extracts referred 
to in the text ; according to these, — 

Shakespeare uses 85 per cent, of Anglo-Saxon, 15 of other words. 



Milton 




n 


81 


i e 


" 


19 


Cowley 




(< 


89 


1 1 


St 


11 


English 
Thomso 


Bible 




97 

85 


tt 

n 


It 


3 
15 


Addison 




" 


83 


" 


t 


17 


Spenser 




(t 


81 


" 


t 


19 


Locke 




(t 


80 


tt t 


' 


20 


Pope 




c t 


76 


tt t 


I 


24 


Young 




" 


79 


it 


t 


21 



104 ETYMOLOGICAL PKOPORTIONS OF WOEDS. [Lect. vi. 

at satisfactory conclusions on this point, more thorough and ex- 
tensive research is necessary. I have subjected much longer ex- 
tracts from several authors to a critical examination, and the re- 
sults I am about to state are in all cases founded, not upon average 
estimates from the comparison of scattered passages, but upon 
actual enumeration.* In writers* whose style is nearly uniform, I 
have endeavored to select characteristic portions as a basis *f or 
computation ; in others, whose range of subject and variety of 
expression is wide, I have compared their different styles with 

Swift uses 89 per cent, of Anglo-Saxon, 11 of other words. 
Robertson " 68 " " 32 

Hume " 65 " " 35 

Gibbon " 58 " " 42 

Johnson " 75 " " 25 

A comparison of these results, derived from single paragraphs containing 
from sixty or seventy to a hundred and fifty words, with those which I have 
deduced from the examination of different passages from the same and other 
authors, each extending to several thousand words, will show that conclusions 
based on data so insignificant in amount as those given by Turner, are entitled 
to no confidence whatever. The extract from Swift contains ninety words, ten 
of which, or eleven per cent., Turner marks as foreign, leaving eighty-nine 
per cent, of Anglo-Saxon. Now this is a picked sentence, for in the John Bull, 
as thoroughly English a performance as any of Swift's works, the foreign 
words are in the proportion of at least fifteen per cent. ; in his History of the 
four last years of Queen Anne, twenty-eight per cent. ; in his Political Lying, 
more than thirty per cent. ; and in this latter work, many passages of consid- 
erable length may be found, where the words of foreign etymology amount to 
forty per cent. On the other hand, Ruskin, in his theoretical discussions, 
often employs twenty-five or even thirty per cent, of Latin derivatives, but in 
the first six periods of the sixth Exercise in his Elements of Drawing, contain- 
ing one hundred and eight words, all but two, namely, pale and practice, are 
Anglo-Saxon. My own comparisons, though embracing more than two hun- 
dred times the quantity of literary material examined by Turner, are still in- 
sufficient in variety and amount, and in discrimination of classes of and char- 
acter of words, to establish any more precise conclusion than the general one 
stated in a following page, namely that the authors of the present day use 
more Anglo-Saxon words, proportionally, than do writers of corresponding 
eminence in the last century. 

* I have made no attempt to determine the etymological proportions of our 
entire verbal stock, because I believe no dictionary contains more than two- 
thirds, or at most three-fourths, of the words which make up the English lan- 
guage. Dictionaries are made from books, and for readers of books, and they 
all omit a vast array of words, chiefly Saxon, which belong to the arts and to 
the humbler fields of life, and which have not yet found their way into literary 
circles. 



LECT. yi.] ETYMOLOGICAL PROPORTIONS OF ENGLISH. 105 

reference to the effect produced upon theni by difference of mat- 
ter and of purpose. I have been able to examine the total vocab- 
ularies only of the Ormulum, the English Bible, Shakespeare, 
and the poetical works of Milton, because these are the only 
English books to which I can find complete verbal indexes. In 
these instances, the comparison of the entire stock of words pos- 
sessed, and the proportions habitually used by the writers, is full of 
interest and instruction, and I regret that leisure and means were not 
afforded for making similar inquiries respecting the vocabularies 
of a larger number of eminent authors near our own time. In 
all cases, proper names are excluded from the estimates, but in 
computing the etymological proportions of the words used in the 
extracts examined, all other words, of whatever grammatical class, 
and all repetitions of the same words, are counted. Thus, in the 
passage extending from the end of the period in verse 362 of the 
sixth book of Paradise Lost, to the end of the period in verse 
372, there are seventy-two words. Eight of these are proper 
names and are rejected, but all the other words are counted, though 
several of them are repetitions of particles and pronouns. In the 
comparison of the total vocabularies, every part of speech is 
counted as a distinct word, but all the inflected forms of a given 
verb or adjective are treated as composing a single word. Thus, 
safe, safely, safety, and save, I make four words, but save, saved, 
and saving, one, as also safe, safer, safest, one. 

I have made no attempt to assign words not of Anglo-Saxon 
origin to their respective sources, but it may be assumed in gen- 
eral that Greek words, except the modern scientific compounds, 
have come to us through the Latin, and both in this case and 
where they have been formed directly from Greek roots, their 
orthography is usually conformed to the Latin standard for simi- 
lar words. T7ords of original Latin etymology have been, as will 
be more fully shown in a future lecture, in the great majority of 
instances, borrowed by us from French, and are still used in 
forms more in accordance w'th the French than with the Latin 
orthography. The proportion, five per cent., allowed by Trench 
to Greek words, I think too great, as is also that for other mis- 
cellaneous etymologies, unless we follow the Celtic school in 
referring to a Celtic origin all roots common to that and the 
Gothic dialects. 
5* 



106 ETYMOLOGICAL PKOPORTIONS OF ENGLISH. [Lect. vi. 

Taking the authors I have examined chronologically, I find, 
with respect to their total vocabularies ) that in that of the Ormu- 
lum (which though written probably not far from the year 1225, 
I consider, in opposition to the opinion of most philologists, as 
English rather than as semi-Saxon), nearly ninety-seven per cent, 
of the words are Anglo-Saxon.* In the vocabulary of the Eng- 

* With, the exception of a very few Latin terms, such as quadriga, 
viper a, &c, I have observed in the Ormulum no word of foreign etymology 
which had not been employed by Anglo-Saxon writers, and thus naturalized 
while Anglo-Saxon was still a living speech. There is a considerable class of 
Saxon words, some of them very important with reference to the question of 
the moral culture of the people, the source and etymology of which it is diffi- 
cult to determine. Law and right, for example, are by many etymologists de- 
rived respectively from the Latin lex and rectus. It is said that 1 a g u 
and lah do not occur in Anglo-Saxon before the reign of Edgar, a.d. 959- 
975. But 1 a g u bears the same relation to the Saxon verb 1 e c g a n , to lay, 
to set down, that the German G e s e t z does to the verb s e t z e n. The Moeso- 
Gothic 1 a g j a n is the equivalent of 1 e c g a n , and though no noun etymo- 
logically corresponding to law occurs in the slender remains we possess of 
that literature, yet a similar word is found in Old-Northern as well as in 
Swedish and Danish. We have in the eighteenth stanza of the V o 1 o - s p a , 
one of the oldest poems of the Edda, p ae r lavg lavgdo, they enacted 
statutes, laid doion the law. We cannot well doubt that lavg and lavgdo 
are related words, and it is not denied that the verb, as well as its cognates in 
the sister tongues, is of primitive Gothic origin. We find in the Saxon Chroni- 
cle MLXXXVIL, an expression very similar to that quoted above from the 
Edda, and in near connection with it the verb s e 1 1 a n in the same sense as 
the Ger. setzen, to appoint or decree : "He ssette mycel deorfrrS, and 
he Isegde laga pser wr$, pat swa hwa swa sloge heort oSSe hinde, pat 
bine man sceolde blendian. * * Eac he ssette be pam haran, pat hi 
mosten freo faran." 

I know not why we should question the etymological relationship between 
1 se g d e and laga, and if these words are connected, there is no reason for 
going to the Latin for the derivation of law. 

Jornandes, who wrote in the sixth century, has a word apparently from the 
same root, and even approximating to our by-law : Nam ethicam eas erudivit, 
ut barbaricos mores ab eis compesceret ; physicam tradens naturaliter propriis 
legibus vivere fecit, quas usque nunc conscriptas bellagines (Ihre, and 
some others, read, bilagines) nuncupant. — De Eeb. Get. cap. xi. 

Bight is found not only in Anglo-Saxon ( r i h t ) , but in all the cognate lan- 
guages, and it is certainly improbable that the Mceso-Goths of the fourth cen- 
tury borrowed from the Latin rectus their raihts, right, just, and 
g a r a i h t s , righteous, which, with several derivatives from them, are used by 
Ulphilas. 

We are, therefore, entitled to consider law and right, and all their deriva- 



Lect. VI.] YOCABULAEIES OF AUTHORS. 107 

lish Bible, sixty per cent, are native ; in that of Shakespeare the 
proportion is very nearly the same ; while of the stock of words 
employed in the poetical works of Milton, less than thirty-three 
per cent, are Anglo-Saxon. 

But when we examine the proportions in which authors actu- 
ally employ the words at their command, we find that, even in 
those whose total vocabulary embraces the greatest number of 
Latin and other foreign vocables, the Anglo-Saxon still largely 
predominates. Thus : 

Robert of Gfloster, narrative of Conquest, pp. 

354, 364, employs of Anglo-Saxon words, Ninety-six per cent. 
Piers Ploughman, Introduction, entire, Eighty-eight per cent. 

" Passus Decimus-Quartus, entire, Eighty-four per cent. 

" Decimus-nonus and vieesimus, en- 
tire, Eighty-nine per cent. 
' ' Creed, entire, Ninety-four per cent, i 
Chaucer, Prologue to Canterbury Tales, first 

430 verses,* Eighty-eight per cent. 

tives, as at least primS facie English and not Latin words. At the same time, 
it must be remembered that history has taught us almost nothing of the moral 
and linguistic relations between the Romans and the progenitors of the mod- 
ern Gothic and Celtic tribes, except that in culture and civilization, as well as 
in material power, the Latin was the superior race, and that Rome was in a 
position to exercise an immense moral as well as social influence over those 
rude populations. With respect, therefore, to the vocabulary of law, of po- 
litical life, and of intellectual action, we are treading on uncertain ground, 
when we positively affirm the domestic origin of a Gothic or Celtic root re- 
sembling a Latin one, and we can seldom be sure that such words have not 
passed directly from the latter to the former, instead of descending from a 
common but remote source. 

* For the purpose of determining more satisfactorily the true character of 
the diction of Langland and of Chaucer, I have counted both the different 
words of foreign derivation and the repetitions of them, in the Passus Deci- 
mus-Quartus of Piers Ploughman and in an equal amount of the Prologue 
to the Canterbury Tales. Exclusive of quotations and proper names, the 
Passus Decimus-Quartus contains somewhat less than 3,200 words. Of these, 
including repetitions, 500, or sixteen per cent., are of Latin or French origin, 
and as there are about 180 repetitions, the number of different foreign words 
is about 320, or ten per cent. In the first 420 verses of the Prologue to the 
Canterbury Tales, the number of words is the same, or about 3,200, of which, 
including repetitions, about 370, or rather less than twelve percent., are Ro- 
mance. The repetitions are but 70, and there remain 300, or rather more 
than nine per cent, of different foreign words. In either point of view, then, 
Chaucer's vocabulary is more purely Anglo-Saxon than that of Langland. It 



108 



VOCABULAKIES OF AUTHOKS. 



[Lect. vi. 



Chaucer, Nonnes Preestes Tale, entire, 
" Squiers Tale, entire, 
" Prose Tale of Melibceus, in about 
3,000 words, 
Sir Thomas More, coronation of Richard III. 

&c.,* seven folio pages, 
Spenser, Faerie Queene, Book II. Canto VII., 
New Testament : 

John's Gospel, chap. I. IV. XVII., 
Matthew, chap. VII. XVII. XVIII., 
Luke, chap. V. XII. XXII., 
Romans, chap. II. VII. XI. XV., 
Shakespeare, Henry IV., Part I., Act. II., 
OtheUo, Act V., 
" Tempest, Act I., 

Milton, L' Allegro, 
1 ' II Penseroso, 
" Paradise Lost, Book VI., 
Addison, several numbers of Spectator, 
Pope, First Epistle, and Essay on Man, 
Swift, Political Lying, 

' ' John Bull, several chapters, 
" Four last years of Queen Anne, to the 
end of sketch of Lord Cowper, 
Johnson, preface to Dictionary, entire, 
Junius, Letters XII. and XXIII. , 
Hume, History of Eng]and, general sketch 
of Commonwealth, forming conclusion 
of chap. LX., 



Ninety-three per cent. 
Ninety-one per cent. 

Eighty-nine per cent. 

Eighty-four per cent. 
Eighty-six per cent. 

Ninety-six per cent. 
Ninety-three per cent* 
Ninety-two per cent. 
Ninety per cent. 
Ninety-one per cent. 
Eighty-nine per cent. 
Eighty-eight per cent. 
Ninety per cent. 
Eighty-three per cent. 
Eighty per cent. 
Eighty-two per cent. 
Eighty per cent. 
Sixty-eight per cent. 
Eighty-five per cent. 

Seventy-two per cent. 
Seventy-two per cent. 
Seventy-six per cent. 



Seventy-three percent. 



must be remembered, however, that there are few Romance words in Piers 
Ploughman which are not found in other English writers of as early a date, 
while Chaucer has many which occur for the first time in his verses, and 
were doubtless introduced by him. 

* Ellis (Preface to reprint of Hardynge) doubts whether the life of Richard 
III., commonly ascribed to Sir T. More, was really written by him ; but 
Ascham treats it as his, and in the edition of More's works prepared by his 
nephew, and printed in 1557, the preliminary note to the Life of Richard 
states expressly that it was composed by Sir Thomas about the year 1513, 
when he was sheriff of London, and that it is now printed from " a copie of 
his own hand." The internal evidence is, indeed, with Ellis; for, in point 
of style, this work is much superior to any of More's undisputed productions, 
and, in fact, deserves the high praise which Hallam has bestowed upon it. 
Still, I think there is hardly sufficient ground for denying the authorship to 
More, and I have selected it as the best example of original English of that 
period. 



Lect. vi.] IMPORTANCE OF SAXON ELEMENT. 



109 



Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. I., chap. VII., 

Webster, Second Speech on Foot's Resolu- 
tion, entire,* 

Irving-, Stout Gentleman, 
" "Westminster Abbey, 

Macaulay, Essay on Lord Bacon, 

Charming, Essay on Milton, 

Cobbett, on Indian Corn, chap. XI., 

Prescott, Philip II., B. I., c. IX., 

Bancroft, History, vol. VII., Battle of Bunk- 
er Hill, 

Bryant, Death of the Flower, 
" Thanatopsis, 

Mrs. Browning, Cry of the Children, 
" Crowned and Buried, 

11 Lost Bower, 

Robert Browning, Blougram's Apology, 

Everett, Eulogy on J. Q. Adams, last twenty 
pages, 

Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, 
Period II., chap. I., 

Tennyson, The Lotus Eaters, 

In Memoriam, first twenty poems, 

Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. II., Part III., 
Sec. II., Chap. V. Of the Superhuman 
Ideal, 

Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, first six exer- 
cises, 

Longfellow, Miles Standish, entire, 

Martineau, Endeavors after the Christian 
Life, III. Discourse, 



Seventy per cent. 

Seventy-five per cent. 
Eighty-five per cent. 
Seventy-seven per cent. 
Seventy-five per cent. 
Seventy-five per cent. 
Eighty per cent. 
Seventy-seven per cent. 

Seventy-eight per cent. 
Ninety-two per cent. 
Eighty-four per cent. 
Ninety-two per cent. 
Eighty-three per cent. 
Seventy-seven per cent. 
Eighty-four per cent. 

Seventy-six per cent. 

Seventy-three per cent. 
Eighty-seven per cent. 
Eighty-nine per cent. 



Seventy-three per cent. 

Eighty-four per cent. 
Eighty-seven per cent. 

Seventy-four per cent. 



The most interesting result of these comparisons, perhaps the 
only one which they can be said to establish, is the fact, that 
the best writers of the present day habitually employ, in both 
poetry and prose, a larger proportion of Anglo-Saxon words than 



* The apparently large proportion of words of Latin origin in this great 
speech, popularly known as the Reply to Hayne, is chiefly due to the frequent 
recurrence of ' Congress,' 'constitution,' and other technical terms of Ameri- 
can political law. "Wherever it was not necessary to employ these expressions, 
the style is much more Saxon. Thus, in the eulogy on Massachusetts, con- 
taining more than two hundred words, eighty-four per cent, are native, and in 
the peroration, beginning, ' God grant,' &c, the Anglo-Saxon words are in 
the proportion of eighty per cent. 



110 SUFFICIENCY OF ENGLISH. [Lect. vi. 

the best writers of the last century. This conclusion is not de- 
duced alone from the numerical computations just given, for in 
estimating the relative prominence of a particular element in the 
vocabulary, we must take into view the whole extent of that 
vocabulary. Now, in this latter particular, there has been a great 
change since the time of Johnson ; for while the number of Saxon 
words remains the same, there has been, within a hundred years, 
a large increase in terms of alien origin. Some older native 
words, it is true, have been revived, but these are not numerous. 
On the other hand, scarcely a word that Johnson and his contem- 
poraries would have used has become obsolete, while the necessi- 
ties of art, science, commerce, and industry, have introduced 
many thousands of Latin, French, and other foreign terms. 
Hence, with respect to vocabulary, the writers of this generation 
are naturally, and almost necessarily, in the position in which 
Milton was exceptionally and artificially. The stock of words 
they possess contains more Latin than Saxon elements ; the dialect 
in which they accustom themselves to think and write is, in much 
the largest proportion, home-born English. This recognition of 
the superior force and fitness of a Saxon phraseology, for all pur- 
poses where it can be employed at all, is the most encouraging of 
existing indications with respect to the tendencies of our mother- 
tongue, as a medium of literary effort. 

Had words of Latin and French etymology been proportionally 
as numerous in the time of Johnson and of Gibbon as they now 
are, those authors, instead of employing twenty-eight or thirty 
per cent, of such words, would scarcely have contented themselves 
with less than fifty. And had either of them attempted the 
sesthetical theories so eloquently discussed by Ruskin, with the 
knowledge and the stock of words possessed by that masterly 
writer, their Saxon would have been confined to particles, pro- 
nouns, and auxiliaries, the mere wheel-work of syntactical move- 
ment. 

Johnson thought that " if the terms of natural knowledge were 
extracted from Bacon ; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation 
from Raleigh ; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, 
few ideas would be lost to mankind for want of English words in 
which they might be expressed." At present, the works of Bacon 
hardly furnish terms for the precise enunciation of any one truth 



Lect. vi.] VOCABULAKY OF MILTON. Ill 

of physical science ; nor would any English writer now think it 
possible to narrate the history of a political revolution, to discuss 
the principles of modern government or of political economy, to 
detail the events of a campaign or a voyage, or to describe a battle, 
in the words of Raleigh. Besides all this, the diffusion of know- 
ledge, and of material appliances and comforts, has made the dia- 
lects of all the sciences more or less a part of the " diction of com- 
mon life," and therefore we can no longer converse, even on fire- 
side topics, altogether in the language of Shakespeare. I do not 
think it at all extravagant to say that the number of authorized 
English words, the great mass of which is understood if not actu- 
ally used by all intelligent persons, is larger, by at least one-fifth, 
than it was in the middle of the eighteenth century ; and this 
great accretion of familiar vocables consists almost wholly of im- 
ported terms. Yet if we compare the usual proportion of Anglo- 
Saxon words employed by good writers of that epoch and of this 
with the whole vocabularies known to them respectively, we shall 
find the relative prominence of the Anglo-Saxon much greater in 
our own time ; for though we know numerically more foreign 
words, we actually use proportionally fewer in literary composi- 
tion. 

The relation between Milton's entire verbal resources and his 
habitual economy in the use of them, is most remarkable. Some 
words of Greek and Latin origin, indeed, such as air, angel, force, 
glory, grace, just, mortal, move, nature, part, peace, &c, occur 
very often, but many of the foreign words employed by him are 
found in but a single passage, whereas the Saxon words are very 
many times repeated. Nor is the predominance of such to be as- 
cribed to the number of particles or other small words, for of these 
Milton is very sparing ; and if we translate almost any period in 
Paradise Lost into Latin, we shall find the difference between the 
number of determinative words in the original and the translation 
by no means large. All this is true, though in a less degree, of 
Shakespeare, and as illustrating the infrequency in his works of 
Latin words, now common, I may observe that abrupt, ambig- 
uous, artless, congratulate, improbable, improper, improve, im- 
pure, inconvenient, incredible, are all anaB, Xsyo/Aeva, once used 
words, with the great dramatist. 

In comparing the linguistic elements which enter into the dia- 



112 VOCABULAKY OF IKVING. [Lect. vi. 

lect of literature as employed by different writers, I think the in- 
fluence of subject and purpose upon the choice of words has not 
been sufficiently considered. "We find that the vocabulary of the 
same writer varies very much in its etymological ingredients, ac- 
cording to the matter he handles and the aims he proposes to him- 
self. This appears, very manifestly, from a comparison of the 
specimens selected for the foregoing computations from the New 
Testament and from Milton, and not less remarkably in those 
from Swift, Irving, and Kuskin. The following passages from 
Irving, in which the words of foreign origin are printed in italics, 
may serve as illustrations. 

From the Stout Gentleman, in Bracebridge-Hall : 
" In one comer was a stagnant pool of water surrounding an 
island * of muck ; there were several half -drowned fowls crowded 
together under a cart, among which was a miserable crest-1 alien 
cock, drenched out of all lif e and spirit ; his drooping tail mat- 
ted, as it were, into a single feather, along which the water trickled 
from his back ; near the cart was a half -dozing cow, chewing the 
cud, and standing patiently to be rained on, with wreaths of 
vapour rising from her reeking hide ; a wall-eyed horse, tired of 
the loneliness of the stable, was poking his spectral head out of 
a window, with the rain dripping on it from the eaves ; an un- 
happy cur, chained to a dog-house hard by, uttered something 
every now and then between a bark and a yelp ; a drab of a 
kitchen-wench trampled backwards and forwards through the 
yard in pattens, looking as sulky as the weather itself ; every 
thing, in short, was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of 
hard-drinking ducks, assembled like boon companions round a 
puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor" 

* Island is one of those English words where a mistaken etymology has led 
to a corrupt orthography. Isle may possibly be the French i 1 e, anciently 
spelt isle, from the Latin insula, but the fact that Robert of Gloucester 
and other early English writers wrote He or yle, at a time when the only French 
orthography was isle, is a strong argument against this derivation. It is 
more probably a contraction of Hand, the Anglo-Saxon ealand, ealond, 
igland , and the s was inserted in both, because, when Saxon was forgotten, 
the words were thought to have come through the French from the Latin i n - 
s u 1 a , in which the s is probably radical. Mr. Kilpstein refers the s in island 
to the genitive in s of the Anglo-Saxon eaorie, but this would be an unusual 
form of composition, and I do not know that easland occurs in Anglo- 
Saxon. 



Lect. vi.] LATIN WOKDS IN ENGLISH. 113 

From Westminster Abbey, in The Sketch Book : 

" It was the tomb of a crusader; of one of those military en- 
thusiasts, who so strangely mingled religion and romance, and 
whose exploits form the connecting link between fact said fiction, 
between the history and the fairy tale. There is something ex- 
tremely picturesque in the tombs of these adventurers, decorated 
as they are with rude armorial bearings and Gothic sculpture. 
They comport with the antiquated chapels in which they are 
generally found ; and in considering them, the imagination is 
apt to kindle with the legendary associations, the romantic fiction, 
the chivalrous pomp and pageantry which poetry has spread over 
the wars for the sepulchre of Christ." 

In the first of these extracts, ont of one hundred and eighty- 
nine words, all but twenty-two are probably native, the propor- 
tions being respectively eighty-nine and eleven per cent. ; in the 
second, consisting of one hundred and six words, we find no less 
than forty aliens, which is proportionally more than three times 
as many as in the first. 

The most numerous additions to the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, 
the most important modifications of English syntax, and conse- 
quently of the general idiom of our speech, have been mediately 
or immediately derived from the Latin. So far as grammatical 
structure is concerned, this influence commenced in the pure 
Anglo-Saxon period, when of course proper English cannot be 
said to have existed. The Angles and the Saxons found upon 
the British soil some traces of the Roman conquest, and Chris- 
tianity, and with it the language of the Romish church, were 
domesticated in England long before either had crossed the Elbe, 
and before a native literature had been created by the race which 
gave to Britain a new name and a new population.* The Old- 
Northern or Scandinavian, and some branches of the Germanic 
families, on the contrary, had acquired a certain culture, and pos- 

* Beowulf and some other Saxon poems contain strong internal evidence of 
having been, in part at least, composed before the diffusion of Christianity 
among the Anglo-Saxons. But in the form in which we have the poem of 
Beowulf, it is indisputably of a later date, nor is there any sufficient ground. 
for supposing that it was written down in the heathen period. Whether it 
previously existed otherwise than as a prose saga, we have no means of deter- 
mining ; and, as a poetical composition, it is, primd facie at least, the work, of a 
Christian bard. 



114: INFLUENCE OF LATIN AND NOEMAN. [Lect. VI. 

sessed what may fairly claim to be considered an independent lit- 
erature, before their adoption of Christianity. The Old-Northern 
and Germanic languages had accordingly been carried to a higher 
degree of polish and refinement than the Anglo-Saxon, and they 
both less needed, and were less susceptible of receiving, gram- 
matical improvement from foreign sources. We consequently 
find, even in the most ancient forms in which the Anglo-Saxon, 
itself but a compromise between discordant dialects,* has come 
down to us, a structure more resembling that of the Eomance 
languages than we meet in Old-Northern or in German. The ar- 
rangement of the period, the whole syntax, had been evidently 
already influenced, and the native inflections (if, indeed, they ever 
had been moulded into a harmonious system) diminished in num- 
ber, variety, and distinctness. The tendencies which have result- 
ed in the formation of modern English had been already im- 
pressed upon the Anglo-Saxon before the Norman Conquest ; and 
the more complete establishment of the ecclesiastical domination 
of Rome had introduced some Latin and French words, and ex- 
pelled from use a corresponding portion of the native vocabulary. 
It even appears that the Romance dialect of Normandy had par- 
tially supplanted the Saxon as early as the reign of Edward the 
Confessor, and it is stated to have been a good deal used at that 
time at court, in judicial proceedings, and in the pulpit, f 

* See Lecture ii. 

f Able philologists have denied that the change which took place in the ver- 
nacular in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, was, in any consider- 
able degree, due to the influence of the Norman invaders, and it is argued that 
the same change would have taken place without the Conquest. It is, I be- 
lieve, denied by none that the language and literature of England were very 
powerfully affected by that influence in the fourteenth century, and those who 
maintain the theory in question, ask us to believe, that though the relations 
between the immigrant and the indigenous population were still substantially 
the same, yet the causes which proved so energetic in the reign of Edward III. 
had been absolutely inert for two hundred and fifty years, and then suddenly 
and spontaneously sprung into full action. I do not suppose it possible to dis- 
tinguish between the effects produced by ecclesiastical Latin and by secular 
Norman, but to refuse to either of them a share in bringing about the change 
from the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred to the English of the reign of Henry III. is to 
ascribe to the Anglican tongue an unsusceptibility to external influences, which 
contrasts strangely with the history of its subsequent mutations. 

Price finds confirmation of this theory in alleged corresponding changes of 



Lect. vi.] PEKFECTION OF ENGLISH. 115 

Tlie causes which have led to the adoption of so large a pro- 
portion of foreign words, and at the same time produced so im- 
portant modifications in the signification of many terms originally 
English, are Yery various. The most obvious of these are the 
early Christianization of the English nation, a circumstance not 
always sufficiently considered in the study of our linguistic history ; 
the isorman conquest ; the Crusades ; and especially the mechan- 
ical industry and commercial enterprise of the British people, the 
former of which has compelled them to seek, in the markets of 
the whole earth, both the material for industrial elaboration and 
a vent for their manufactures ; the latter has made them the com- 
mon carriers and brokers of the world. With so many points of 
external contact, so many conduits for the transmission of every 
species of foreign influence, it would imply a great power of re- 
pulsion and resistance in the English tongue if it had not become 
eminently composite in its substance and in its organization. In 
fact, it has so completely adapted itself to the uses and wants of 
Christian society, as exemplified by the Anglo-Saxon race in the 
highest forms to which associate life has anywhere attained, that 
it well deserves to be considered the model speech of modern hu- 
manity, nearly achieving in language the realization of that great 
ideal which wise men are everywhere seeking to make the funda- 
mental law of political organization, the union of freedom, stability, 
and progress. 

the Low German dialects, and Latham in those of the Danish and Swedish. 
But the Low German, and the Danish and Swedish, have been exposed, not 
indeed to precisely the same causes of revolution as the Anglo-Saxon, but to 
somewhat analogous influences, and in all these cases the nature and amount 
of change is, not corresponding to that of the Anglo-Saxon, but almost exactly 
proportioned to the character and amount of extraneous disturbing force. The 
Latin has operated more or less on all of them. The Icelandic, isolated 
as it is, has remained almost the same for seven centuries ; the Swedish, and 
the dialects of secluded districts in Norway, being less exposed to foreign in- 
fluences than the Danish, retain a very large proportion of the characteristics 
of the Old-Northern, while the language of Denmark, a country bordering 
upon Germany, and bound to it by a thousand ties, has become almost half 
Teutonic. If then we are to refer such changes to inherent tendencies only, how 
are we to explain these diversities between dialects, which, even after the birth 
of what is distinctively the English language, were still nearly identical ? See 
Sir F. Madden's Preface to Layamon, p. 1, and the authorities there cited. 
See also Lecture xvii. 



116 PEBFECTION" OF ENGLISH. . [Lect. vt. 

It is a question of much interest how far the different constitu- 
ents of English have influenced each other, or in other words, 
how far each class of them has impressed its own formal charac- 
teristics upon those derived from a different source. Let us take 
the reciprocal influence of the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin. We 
shall find it a general rule, that where the English word is made 
up of a Latin root with new terminal syllables, or suffixes, which 
modify the signification of the word or determine the grammati- 
cal class to which it belongs, those syllables are Saxon, while in- 
stances of Saxon radicals with Latin terminations are compara- 
tively rare. With respect to prefixes, however, which, with the 
root, usually constitute compounds, not derivatives, the case is 
otherwise, and we have generally employed Latin prefixes with 
Latin roots,* seldom or never Latin prepositions with Saxon roots. 
We have indeed taken most of our Latin words entire in some 
derivative shape, as they were formed and employed by the Lat- 
ins themselves or the French after them, and thus the two great 
classes remain distinct in form, each following its own original 
law ; nevertheless if there is a change, the Latin yields. The 
Saxon roots with Latin passive terminations are chiefly adjectives 
like eatable, bearable, carriageable, bootable, readable, to a few of 
which custom has reconciled us ; but many words of this class 
employed by old writers, such as doable, are obsolete, and the ear 
revolts at once at a new application of this ending ; whereas we 
accept, without scruple, Latin and French roots with a Saxon ter- 
mination, f Motionless, painful, painless, joyful, joyless, and 

* The Saxon inseparable privative ue- is an exception, a majority of our 
words beginning with this prefix being of Komance origin. At present, we 
incline to harmonize our etymology by substituting the Latin in- for the 
native particle, in words of foreign extraction. For example, awcapable is 
now exclusively used for the older -^capable. 

Palsgrave in his list of verbs, p. 650, gives us loutcept for I except, but I 
have not met with this anomalous compound elsewhere, though outtake for 
except is very common in early English. 

t There is a Saxon noun, of rare occurrence, abal, signifying ability, to 
which this termination might be referred. Did we not find in Icelandic a 
corresponding root, a b 1 or a f 1 , which exists in too many forms to be other- 
wise than indigenous, I should suspect abal to be itself derived from the 
Latin adjective h a b i 1 i s . The historical evidence is in favor of deriving our 
adjectival ending in -Ue from the Latin -abilis, -ibilis, through the 
French -able, ible. In early English, this termination had by no 



Lect. vi.] COMPARISON OF ADJECTIVES. 117 

even ceaseless, almost the only instance of the use of the privative 
ending with a verbal root,* offend no Englishman's sense of con- 
grnity ; nor do we hesitate to extend the process, and to s&yjoy- 
less-ness, and the like. Foreign verbs we conjugate according to 
the Saxon weak form, bnt I remember scarcely an instance of 
the application of the strong conjugation, with the letter-change, 
to a Romance root.f "We compare foreign adjectives after the 
Saxon fashion, by the addition of the syllables -er and -est, except 
that recently, in conformity to a rule which has no foundation in 
good taste or in the practice of the best writers, we have, in poly- 
syllables, almost exclusively employed the comparison by more 
and most. The rule I speak of probably originated in a sense of 
incongruity in the adaptation of the Saxon form of comparison 
to adjectives borrowed from the French, and ending, as modified 
by English orthoepy, in -ous. The adjectives with this ending 
have all two, perhaps most of them three, syllables, and thus a 
repugnance, which at first belonged only to the termination, was 

means a uniformly passive force, and it formerly ended many words where 
we have now replaced it by -al and -ful. Thus, in Holland's Pliny, medicin- 
al is always used instead of medicinal; Fisher, in his Sermon had at the 
Moneth Minde of the noble Prynces Margarete, countesse of Richmonde and 
Darbye, has vengeable for vengeful, and Hooker (Discourse of Justification) 
has vjowerable for powerful. Similar forms often occur in Shakespeare. We 
still say delectable for delightful, but this is going out of use. Impeccable, 
however, maintains its ground among theologians, and comforta^e is too 
strongly rooted to be disturbed. In an article on Japan in the London Daily 
Neics of October 26, 1864, I find mention of a " tradal passage " into the In- 
land Sea, meaning a passage navigable for and used by merchant ships. 

This ending not unfrequently made the adjective a sort of gerundial, and 
hence " it is considerate," in the literature of the seventeenth century, gener- 
ally meant " it is to be considered." The adjective reliable, in the sense of wor- 
thy of confidence, is altogether unidiomatic. The termination in -idle is rather 
more uncertain in its force than that in -able. Milton's use of visible in Para- 
dise Lost, I. 63, is remarkable. " Darkness visible" is not darkness as itself 
an object of vision, a mere curtain of black impenetrable cloud, but it is a 
sable gloom, through which, in spite of its profound obscurity, the fearful 
things it shrouded were supernaturally " visible." 

* Grower (Pauli's edition, II. 211, 214) uses liaveless, but I do not know that 
this word is found elsewhere. Tireless and resistless occur in good writers. 

f The participial adjective distraught from distract is a case of this sort, and 
Spenser (Faerie Queene, B. I. c. VI. St. 43) has raile for rolled, the preterite 
of roll, but there is some doubt whether roll is not of Anglo-Saxon, or at least 
Gothic parentage. 



118 INSIGNIFICANCE OF CELTIC. [Lect. vr. 

gradually extended to native words resembling the French ad- 
jectives in the number of their syllables. Ascham writes inven- 
tivest, Bacon honorablest, and ancienter, Fuller eminentest, elo- 
quenter, Hooker learnedest, solemnest, famousest, virtuousest, 
with the comparative and superlative adverbs wiselier, easilier, 
hardliest, Sidney even repiningest, Coleridge safeliest, and simi- 
lar forms occur abundantly in Shakespeare.* In fact, the rule 
never was adopted by thoroughly English authors, and is happily 
little observed by the best usage of the present day. 

To one acquainted with the history of Great Britain, the com- 
parative insignificance of the Celtic element, both as respects the 
grammar and the vocabulary of English, is a surprising fact, and 
the want of more distinct traces of Celtic influence in the develop- 
ment of the Continental languages is equally remarkable. f 

* Even the names of the cardinal points were formerly sometimes compared 
by the argumentative method. Thus, in the curiously minute account of the 
comet of the eleventh year of Edward IV. in Warkworth's Chronicle, printed 
by the Cam. Soc, it is said : * * " and it arose ester and ester, till it arose full 
este, and rather and rather." — p. 22. In cognate Danish, all active and most 
passive participles, all adjectives compounded of adjective and noun, as 
bredskwldret, and many polysyllables, are compared by meer and meest. This 
mode of comparison is little used in Icelandic and not at all in Mceso-Gothic. 
As for the Dutch, see Brill, Nederlandische SpraaTdeer, p. 203. We have in 
English, uppermost, foremost, hindmost, inmost, outermost, utmost, and in pro- 
vincial English, bettermost. Gil lays down these rules for the comparison of 
adjectives : 

Per er et est non comparantur verbalia activa in ing ; ut luring amans ; nee 
passiva ; ut lured amatus, taught doctus ; uti nee composita cum abl, ful, les, 
Ijk, * * ; neque etiam ilia quae per jv (ive), ish, et multa quae per Ij (ly), aut 
us * * * . Hue etiam refer materialia, ut goldn aureus, stbni lapideus : 
item quae tempus significant et ordinem * * ; ut icintrj hibernus, second, 
third. Et quamvis aliquando audias stonier, aut f amuser, tamen pro libertate 
loquendi tolerabilius erit sermo, potius quam laudabilis scriptura. Per signa 
tamen omnia fere quae diximus comparantur ; ut mor luring, most luring, etc. 
—Alex. Gil, Logon, Ang., 1621, p. 35. 

It will be observed that with Gil the mode of comparison depended on the 
ending, not on the length of the adjective. 

f See similar views as to insignificance of Celtic element in French : Brachet, 
Gram. Hist., 21. It is true that the Celts, though apparently never linguisti- 
cally superior to any of the semi-barbarous tribes with which they were brought 
into contact, seem, at least in the Gallic branch of the race, to have been, at 
the time of the Roman invasion, considerably more advanced in many of the 
arts of civilization than were the Romans themselves. For instance, the elder 
Pliny, Nat. Hist., Book XVIII., Chap. XXX., informs us that the Gauls had 



Lect. vi.] INSIGNIFICANCE OF CELTIC. 119 

Of European languages, the Celtic alone has not propagated or 
extended itself, and it does not appear ever to have been employed 
bj any bat those rude races to whom it was aboriginal as well as 
vernacular. Nor has it in any important degree modified the struc- 
ture, or scarcely even the vocabulary, of the languages most ex- 
posed to its action. Two thousand years ago, if we are to rely on 
the general, though it must be admitted uncertain, testimony of 
historical narrators and inquirers, the British islands, France, a 
large part of Switzerland, a considerable extent of the coasts of 
the Adriatic, of the valley of the Danube, and of Northern Italy, 
as well as portions of the Spanish peninsula, and an important 
territory in Asia Minor, were, with the exception of small mari- 
time colonies of Italian, Greek, and Phenician origin, inhabited 

reaping machines surprisingly like some of the earlier forms of the same im- 
plement in the United States and England. " As touching the manner of cut 
ting downe or reaping corne, there he diverse and sundry devises. In Fraunce 
where the fields be large, they use to set a jade or an asse unto the taile of a 
mightie great wheelebarrow or cart made in manner of a Van, and the same 
set with keene and trenchant teeth sticking out on both sides : now is this carre 
driven forward before the said beast upon two wheeles, into the standing ripe 
corne (contrarie to the manner of other carts that are drawne after) the said 
teeth or sharpe tines, fastened to the sides of the wheelebarrow or car aforesaid, 
catch hold of the corne eares, and cut them off : yet so, as they fall presently 
into the bodie of the wheelebarrow." It is remarkable also that the Latin 
names for four-wheeled and some other vehicles were of Gallic etymology. 
The Gauls are also believed to have invented wooden vessels composed of 
staves, and our word basket, implying a vessel woven of twigs or thin strips 
of wood, is known to be of ancient Gallic derivation. Caesar, in a passage 
which I have never seen satisfactorily explained, speaks of the Greek letters as 
known to the Gauls, and the walls of some of their fortified stations were ap- 
parently laid in mortar. But while the Romans were thus borrowing useful 
implements and their names from the Gauls, their relations with the Gothic 
tribes were the reverse ; for they furnished the latter with both names and 
things. Koenen, Bcerenstand, p. 17, cites the Netherlandish akker, from 
the Latin ager, hooivork, from Latin furca, juk, from Latin jugum, 
zaad from satum, wan from vannus, dorse 7i vie gel from flagellum, 
sikkel from secula ; spade from spatha. This list might be greatly ex- 
tended. Tacitus, De Mor. Ger., c. 26, observes : " Auctumni perinde nomen 
ac bona ignorantur," they have neither the name of autumn nor its fruits ; 
and Ihre, and many other etymologists, suppose that the Dutch oogst, the 
German obst , the Danish and Swedish host, are from the Latin name of 
the harvest month August. So the German fr ucht is in all probability the 
Latin fruct us, and the Anglo-Saxon munt can hardly be other than the Latin 
mons. 



120 INSIGNIFICANCE OF CELTIC. [Lect. vi. 

exclusively by Celts. The race is now confined to Western and 
South-Western England, the Scottish Highlands, Ireland, and a 
narrow district in Western France. In Wales alone did they at- 
tain an elevated original and spontaneous culture, and in their dis- 
appearance from their wide domain, they have left indeed some 
ruined temples, some popular superstitions, as relics of their idol- 
atrous worship, but scarcely a distinguishable trace of their influ- 
ence in the character, the languages, or the institutions of the 
peoples which have superseded them. Upon the Anglo-Caledo- 
nian border the Saxons and the Celts were brought face to face, 
and, after centuries of alternate amity and hostility, reduced at 
length to a common rule, and to some extent amalgamated with 
each other. Yet the brief inroads and partial conquests of the 
Scandinavians have modified the Scottish dialect far more than 
have the long neighborhood and close relations between the Saxons 
and the Celts. 

We may safely say that, though the primitive language of 
Britain has contributed to the English a few names of places and 
of familiar material objects, yet it has, upon the whole, affected 
our vocabulary and our syntax far less than any other tongue 
with which the Anglo-Saxon race has ever been brought widely 
into contact. I might go too far in saying that we have borrowed 
numerically more words from the followers of Mohammed than 
from the aborigines of Britain, but it is very certain that the few 
we have derived from the distant Arabic are infinitely more 
closely connected with, and influential upon, all the higher in- 
terests of man, than the somewhat greater number which we have 
taken from the contiguous Celtic. 

These facts point to a very radical diversity, an irreconcilable 
incongruity, between the Celtic language and the dialects of the 
numerous unrelated races that have at one time and another re- 
duced Celtic tribes to subjection. I am not ignorant that recent 
etymologists have found many resemblances between Celtic and 
Gothic, as well as Romance radicals, but it is probable that in 
many instances these very words had been imposed upon the 
Celts by foreign influences, and in others, the English words 
which have been said to be Celtic, such as crook, pan, and the 
like, can be traced as far back in Gothic as in Celtic dialects.* 

* I am not here controverting the opinions of Prichard and other advocates 



Lect. vi.] INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE PREVAILS. 121 

Laiiffuaffes, like the serfs of ancient times and of the Middle 

© © ' 

Ages, seem to be glebae adseriptitise, and it may be laid 
down as a general rule, in cases of territorial conquest, (unless the 
invaders have such a superiority of physical power as to be able 
to extirpate the native race altogether, or unless they possess a 
very marked superiority in point of intellect and culture,) that 
wherever the subjected nation even approximates to an equality 
in material or mental force, the native dialect is adopted by the 
conquerors, and soon becomes again the exclusive language of the 
country. Of this, history exhibits numerous instances, with few, 
if any, conflicting examples, and it is accordingly in the relative 
condition and character of the parties, that we are to look for the 

of the original Indo-European character of the Celtic languages, but I speak of 
the actual relations of the Celtic, the Gothic, and the Romance tongues, through 
the period during which we can trace their fortunes with historical certainty. 
The Celtic dialects, at the earliest moment when we can be fairly said to know 
any thing of their vocabularies, had been long exposed to the action of Gothic 
and Romance influences, and the English language is a case in point to show 
that there is scarcely any limit to the proportion of foreign words which a 
tongue of inferior culture may incorporate into its stock, without losing its 
own radical character. We have not only borrowed abstract and philosophical 
terms in multitudes, but many of our test words, our designations of the most 
familiar things in nature, such as air, color, face, feature., j.o'int, soil, are of 
Latin origin. It is far from improbable that very many of the verbal coinci- 
dences between the Celtic and other European languages may find their ex- 
planation in the action of like causes. Etymology has its fashions and its ca- 
prices as well as other human pursuits, and Keltism seems just now to be the 
prevailing epidemic in this department. 

Comparative philologists draw inferences from the coincidence of parts of 
the Gothic and Celtic vocabularies, which seem to me by no means warranted. 
Nobody doubts that both these classes of speech belong to the Indo-European 
family, and therefore very many words must be common to them all ; but the 
supposition, that in such cases the Goth borrowed from the Celt, is in most 
instances contrary to historical probability, and the converse is, most likely, 
quite as often the fact. In the etymological research of the present day, the 
historical method of investigation is unhappily much neglected, and ethnolo- 
gists are constructing historical systems on the foundation of linguistic theory, 
instead of controlling and rectifying such theory by historical evidence. 

The comparative philology of the languages of Europe, in their actual de- 
velopment in the Middle Ages, will ultimately prove one of the fertile sources 
of instruction upon the true theory and true history of human speech, and we 
shall find that many Gothic and many Romance words, which have hitherto 
been referred to very distant sources, are really contributions which the one 
has borrowed from the other. 
6 



122 MIXTUBE OF LANGUAGES. [Lect. vi. 

causes of the predominance of the Gothic and Romance, and the 
disappearance of the Celtic people and languages. The extension 
of the Latin, wherever it took root, was the triumph of civiliza- 
tion, and of that knowledge which is power, over barbarism of 
manners and inferiority of intellect. In Greece, where the in- 
tellectual conditions were reversed, though the armies of Rome 
were victorious, her language never prevailed, while in the lower 
Danubian provinces, in Gaul, in Spain, and at last, after a long- 
struggle, in Sicily, as well as a considerable part of Southern 
Italy, it superseded the indigenous dialects, wherever the Greek 
had not anticipated it. On the other hand, the barbarian invaders 
of the Roman empire adopted the languages of their new sub- 
jects, and Goths, Yandals, Tatars alike, once established on what 
was now Christian soil, were soon confounded in speech with the 
conquered nation. Thus the Hunno-Bulgarians exchanged their 
Tatar for a Slavic dialect. The Avars and Slaves domiciliated in 
Greece became Hellenized in language. The Northmen in West- 
ern France adopted a Romance tongue, and the Teutons in France 
and Northern Italy, as well as the Goths in Spain, all conformed 
to the speech no less than to the religion of the native tribes. 
True, they in all cases more or less modified the newly acquired 
language, and dialectic differences between the different Romance 
branches, otherwise inexplicable, may in part be accounted for by 
corresponding differences between the tongues whose elements 
were thus mixed with them. Thus, modern Italian has a con-, 
siderable infusion of Teutonic words and phrases, and there are 
communities south of the Alpine chain whose vocabulary is in 
the largest proportion Teutonic ; * just as on the other hand we 



* The Cimbric districts, as they are called, consist of the Sette Comuni, and 
the Tredici Comuni. The Sette Comuni, or Seven Towns, occupy a territory 
thirty or forty miles square, bounded east and west by the Brenta and the 
Astico respectively, north by a chain of the Tyrolese Alps, and south by a low 
ridge which separates them from the plain of Vicenza. The Tredici Comuni, 
or Thirteen Towns, are of less than half as great territorial extent, and lie near 
Verona, chiefly in a north-eastern direction. There are also some small Cimbric 
communities in Friuli. The whole Cimbric population is thirty or forty thou- 
sand souls. Some thousands of these now use Italian exclusively, and that 
language is gradually superseding the Teutonic among the whole people. The 
Lord's prayer in Cimbric (Catechism of 1842) is as follows : 

" Unzar Yater von me Hiimmele, sai gaeart ear halgar namo ; kemme dar 



Lect. VI.] MIXTURE OF LANGUAGES. 123 

find in Switzerland, intermixed with a German population, small 
districts whose inhabitants^ like those of "Wallachia and Moldavia, 
still speak a corrupted, modernized Latin. In some instances, the 
new element does not much affect the lexical character, but ex- 
hibits itself in the structure, the inflections, and the syntax. Of 
this the Spanish is an instance. Northern words indeed are not 
numerous, but the syntax as well as the nobility of the land is 
largely informed with the sangre azul, the blue blood, of the 
Gothic invader. The entire peninsular speech, and especially the 
dialects of the provinces longest occupied by the Moslems, were 
also much affected by the influence of the Arabic* The Arabs 
did not adopt the language of Spain, for the reason that, though 
less numerous and physically weaker than the Spaniards, they 
were morally and intellectually the superior people, and they 
therefore imposed their language on their subjects, and essentially 
modified the speech of provinces never brought under their juris- 
diction, though still within the reach of their influence. Spanish 
Jews and Spanish Christians wrote in Arabic. A Portuguese 
bishop composed in the language of the Koran treatises on the 
Deity, the immortality of the soul, purgatory, and eternal punish- 
ment, and Christian Spaniards not unfrequently employed the 
Arabic character in writing their native tongue. 

eiir Hitmmel ; sai gataant allez baz ar belt jart, bia in Hummel, aso af d'earda, 
ghetiiz heiite iinzar proat von altaghe ; un lacettiz naach tinzare schulle, bia bar 
lacense naach biar den da saint schullik iiz ; haltettiz galiiitet von tentaciiin ; 
un hevetuz de libel. Aso saiz." 

The use of Heaven in the second petition, instead of Kingdom, is noticeable. 

See Schmeller's Cimbrisches Wbrterbuch, herausgegeben von Bergrnann, 1855. 

There are, in many other Alpine nooks, fragmentary remains of a Germanic 
dialect closely akin to the Cimbric of the Sette and Tredici Gomuni, if not 
identical with it. For instance, in the Kalser-Thal, the Hoch Deutsch, der 
Kleine, becomes der Kloane, and the German iceich, as I have shown in the 
American edition of Wedgewood's Etymological Dictionary, becomes in Cim- 
bric, boach, which is evidently identical with the Celtic, bog — a curious coinci- 
dence between words apparently alien to each other, and thus furnishing a 
new proof of the relationship between the Gothic and the Celtic tongues. 

* Interesting observations on the influence of the Gothic and Arabic upon 
the Romance of Spain will be found in Ticknor's Spanish Literature, vol. I. , 
95, and vol. III., 201, 337, 371, 385. The estimate of 'Northern' words in 
Spanish given from a native philologist at p. 385, ten per cent., seems to me too 
large, but the Gothic portion of the language is so much disguised in form as 
not readily to be recognized. 



124 ARABIC IN SPAIN AND SICILY. [Lect. vi. 

In like manner, in the two centuries and a half of Arab domin- 
ion in Sicily, the culture of that remarkable people was so thor- 
oughly rooted, that under the Northern conquerors and the 
Hohenstaufen, Arabic was the language of commerce, and even 
often employed in public monuments. The ordinances of the 
Norman princes of Sicily were as frequently drawn up in Arabic 
as in Greek or Latin, and in the Sicilian churches of the Norman 
period, Arabic inscriptions appear on the columns and other parts 
of the structures.* 

Considering the prominent political and commercial position of 
Spain in the sixteenth century, the importance of her literature, 
and the extent to which it was then cultivated in England, it is 
surprising that so few English words can be referred to a Spanish 
origin. Sidney, and other writers of that day who imitated the 
poetic forms of Spain, borrowed nothing from her vocabulary, 
and even the dialect of navigation and commerce has adopted few 
Spanish words which were not originally either Arabic or Amer- 
ican. Cargo and embargo are certainly Spanish, trade and traffic 
probably so, but these stand almost alone in our vocabulary. We 
owe, in fact, more to Portuguese than to Spanish etymology, and 
it is remarkable that many words now current almost all over 
Europe, and popularly supposed to be of African or East Indian 
derivation, are really native Portuguese. Thus, fetishism or 
feticism — the low idolatry and sorcery of Western Africa, now so 
commonly used in all parts of Europe to signify the most de- . 
based and superstitious material worship — generally thought to be 
an African word, is only the Portuguese feitico,f sorcery or 
witchcraft, which is derived from the Latin fa cere, fa ctitius ; 
coco, the well-known name of the nut of a palm and of the tree 
that produces it, (usually spelled erroneously cocoa,% from a con- 

* Serradifalco, Duomo di Monreale, pp. 24, 41, 73, 84. See also Witte. 
Alpinisclies u. Transalpinisclies, 429. 

f The Spanish etymological correlative of f e i t i 9 o is hechizo, A in 
mod. Sp. often corresponding to Port. /, cli to Port. t. Ihre points out the re- 
semblance of these words to the Swedish h e x a , a witch, and suggests that 
they may have been introduced into Spain by the Goths. 

X This false orthography is a comparatively recent corruption. The journals 
in Purchas, Dam pier and all the old travellers, spell the word properly, coco, or 
sometimes cocos or coker. Johnson strangely blunders and confounds the sig- 



Lect. yi.1 POETUGUESE WOEDS IN ENGLISH. 125 

fusion with cacao, a totally different vegetable,) is the Portu- 
guese word for bugbear, and, according to De Barros, the great 
historian of his country's Oriental conquests, the name was 
applied to the nut from its rude resemblance to a distorted human 
face, or a mask used by nurses to frighten children ; * palaver, a 
council of African chiefs, is the Portuguese palavra, word, 
talk ; commodore, derived by our dictionaries from the Spanish 
comendador, which is of altogether another signification, is a 
corruption of the Portuguese capitao mor, or chief -captain, 
a phrase precisely equivalent in meaning to our own term. Caste, 
as a designation of social or political rank or class, is from casta, 
a word of doubtful origin, common to Spanish and Portuguese, 
but it was borrowed by both England and the Northern Conti- 
nental nations from the Portuguese accounts of India. Cash and 
cashier are more probably from the Portuguese c a x a than from the 
French c a i s s e , and even the current Chinese cash, the name 
of a small coin, has been supposed to come from the Portuguese 
word. The same language suggests a possible etymology for the 
obscure word dungeon. The dungeon, dongeon, or donjon keep, 
(Low Latin, dunjo, domgio, domnio,)was originally the 
principal tower in a feudal castle. It is called in Portuguese 
torre de homenagem, tower of homage, because it con- 
tained the reception room in which fealty or homage to the lord 
was pledged, and this is not improbably the source of the French 
word and our own. 

nification and etymology of coco and cacao, and modern botany has dignified 
the Portuguese bugbear, by latinizing it into c o c o s , as the generic name of a 
branch of the palm family. 

* Esta casca * * * tern huma maneira aguda, que quer semelhar o 
nariz posto entre dous olhos redondos ; * * * por razao da qal figura sem 
ser figura, os nossos lhe chamaram coco, nome imposto pelas mulheres a qual- 
quer cousa, com que querem fazer medo as criancas, o qual nome assi lhe 
ficou, que ninguem lhe sabe outro, sendo o seu proprio, como lhe os Malabares 
chamam, Tenga, e os Canarijs, Narle. De Barros, Asia. Dec. III., Liv. III., 
cap. VII. 

Oviepo (Eamusio, III. 64, A., Purchas, III. 982) says: "This first was 
called coco for this cause, that when it is taken from the place where it 
cleaveth fast to the tree, there are seene two holes, and above them two other 
naturall holes, which altogether do represent the gesture and figure of the 
cattes called mammons, that is monkeys, when they cry, which [cry] the In- 
dians call c o c a." But De Barros is a higher authority than Oviedo, and his 
derivation is the more probable. 



126 POKTUGUESE WORDS IN ENGLISH. [Lect. VI. 

In all these cases, except the last, which is explained by the re- 
semblance of the Portuguese homenagem to the feudal Latin 
homagium, homanagium, homenagium, theearlymo- 
nopoly of distant navigation and of the African and East Indian 
trade by the Portuguese, accounts for the introduction of the 
words into the vocabulary, not of England only, but of all 
Europe ; and it is through the channel of commerce that we have 
borrowed the phrase to van-amuck from the Malays, taboo from 
the Sandwich Islands, and hundreds of other words, now almost 
universal, from equally remote and obscure sources. There is a 
very common word, demijohn, the name of a large glass bottle 
covered with wickerwork, which occurs in most European lan- 
guages in nearly the same form. This strange word has been a 
sad puzzle to etymologists. It is often written in English with a 
hyphen between the second and third syllables, as if, notwith- 
standing its capacity, it were but the half of a whole John. In 
France, it is made a compound, dame- Jeanne, Lady Jane, 
and a French etymologist has fabled that it took its name from 
its introduction into Europe by an apocryphal Lady Jane, a dis- 
tinguished dame of that nation. Every one who has been in the 
East will remember that this portly vessel, — locally called kara- 
bah, whence carboy, — is there called damagan,or damajan, 
and the name, as well as the thing, is generally supposed to have 
been borrowed from the Christians by the unbelievers. The fact 
is, however, that the demijohn was formerly largely manufactured 
at Damaghan, a town in Khorassan, a province of Persia once 
famous for its glass works, and hence the name. Our commercial 
nomenclature is full of similar instances, and the wide range of 
modern, and especially English, traffic, makes them simple 
enough ; but when we find that the Icelanders, in their remote 
and isolated abode, call the elephant by the same name as the 
Arabs, feel, we are unable to account for so strange a coinci- 
dence, until we learn that in the good old times of simple medie- 
val devotion, the neophyte Northmen were wont to signalize 
their conversion from the darkness of heathenism, by a Mediter- 
ranean venture, combining the characters of a piratical cruise and 
a pious pilgrimage. In these expeditions they now and then fell 
in with an argosy,* manned by paynim Arabs, or Blamenn as 

* Argosy is generally supposed to be derived from the appellation of the 



Lect. vi. J INTKODUCTION OF FOEEIGN WOEDS. 127 

they called them, or even entered the harbor of a Moorish town on 
the coast of Spain, or of Serkland, the land of the Saracens, 
plundered the infidels, if they were able, and trafficked with them 
if they were not. Hence it is that we find Cufic coin in Scandi- 
navian barrows, Arabic words in the Old-Northern tongue. 

The study of foreign literatures, and the introduction of new 
words by foreign immigrants, in countries which, like England 
and America, are centres of attraction for the whole earth, are 
sources of accretion too familiar to require detailed consideration, 
but the effects of the extension of commerce and industry deserve 
more than a passing notice. Every new article of trade, every 
new style of foreign goods, brings with it either its native desig- 
nation or an epithet indicative of the country whence it is im- 
ported, and the name very often remains in a new application 
after the particular article has disappeared from our market. 
Thus calico was originally applied to certain cotton goods im- 
ported from Calicut, in India, as in French rouennerie from 
Rouen. We now use it only of printed cottons of a very differ- 
ent texture, while in England all plain white cottons are called 
calico. In the Levant, the superiority of American cotton goods 
formerly gave them a preference in the markets, and the hawkers 
who sold cotton stuffs, of whatever fabric, in the streets, described 
them as American cotton to attract custom. Gradually they 
dropped the word cotton, and cloths of that material are now 
called simply Americans. When, therefore, an American trav- 
eller hears a Hebrew peddler crying A m e r i c a n i ! at his heels, 
in the streets of Smyrna or Constantinople, he need not suppose 
that the Oriental is taunting him with his Yankee nationality ; it 
is only, in the want of a daily Times, or Tribune, or Herald, a 
mode of advertising that the colporteur has cottons to sell. 

Numerous as are the foreign words which commerce and for- 
eign art have incorporated into English, it is probable that these 
loans have been repaid by England and America, in the con- 
tributions we have made to other languages. A distinguished 
Southern gentleman comforted unlucky English bond-holders, in 

mythic ship Argo ; but it has been suggested, and not without probability, 
that the name is a corruption of Bagusan, the national designation of the ves- 
sels employed in the commerce of the important port of Kagusa. 



128 DIFFUSION OF TVOKDS. [Lect. yi. 

the days of repudiation, by assuring them that the Anglo-Saxon 
race, on our side of the Atlantic as well as on the other, was as 
much a debt-paying as a land-stealing people. I need not speak 
upon the question of pecuniary conscientiousness, but in words, 
which we can spare without much sacrifice, we have been just 
and even generous. Our trade and our industry, in conjunction 
with those of England, have sown a broad crop of English and 
American words over the face of the earth. A French poet com- 
plains that England has compelled his countrymen to utter articu- 
lations as hard as chewing glass or charcoal : 

Le railway, le tunnel, le ballast, le tender, 
Express, trucks, et wagons, une bouche Francaise 
Seuible broyer du verre ou macher de la braise. 

These words have passed from England to every Continental 
country, but it is only a restitution of borrowed stock with usury, 
for of the seven, only ballast, wagons, and the last half of rail- 
way, are Anglo-Saxon. The nomenclature of steam navigation, 
which has become not less universal, is more purely American. 
Wherever you meet the steamboat your ear will welcome familiar 
sounds. You will hear Frenchmen on the Rhone, Danes in the 
Belts, Teutons on the Rhine, Magyars and Slaves on the Danube, 
and Arabs on the Nile, all alike shouting, half -steam ! stop her ! 
go ahead ! and many an uninstructed traveller has been agree- 
ably surprised at finding such a remarkable resemblance between 
good mother-English and barbarous Dutch or heathen Arabic, as 
these homelike words so plainly indicate. 

Vegetable nature has provided for the dissemination of plants 
by employing the movable winds and waters, and the migratory 
beasts 'of the field and fowls of the air, in the transportation of 
their seeds. Providence has not less amply secured the diffusion 
and intermixture of words of cardinal importance to the great 
interests of man. Religion, natural science, moral and intel- 
lectual philosophy, and diplomacy, have introduced into English 
thousands of words nearly identical with those employed for the 
same purposes in all the languages in Christendom. The history 
and origin of these are generally very easily traced, but every 
generation gives birth to a multitude of expressions whose date 
we can fix with approximate precision, but the etymology and 






Lect. vl] DIFFUSION OF WOEDS. 129 

source of which are unknown at the very period of their intro- 
duction. These are, for the most part, mere popular words, 
which obtain no place in literature, but die with the memory of 
the occasions out of which they grew. But it sometimes happens 
that such words become permanent, though often ungraceful,, 
additions to our vocabulary, and remain as standing enigmas to 
the etymologist. Of such, our American caucus is an example, 
and every man's recollection will suggest other instances. 

The French essayist Montaigne gives us a striking example of 
the strange accidents by which foreign words are sometimes in- 
troduced. In order the better to familiarize him with Latin, the 
common speech of the learned in those days, he was allowed in 
his childhood to use no other language, and not only his teachers, 
but his parents, attendants, and even his nurserymaid, were 
obliged to learn enough of Latin to converse with him in it. 
The people of the neighboring villages adopted some of the Latin 
words which they heard constantly used in the family of their 
feudal lord ; and, writing fifty years later, he declares that these 
words had become permanently incorporated into the dialect of 
the province.* 

* Quant au reste de sa rnaison, c'estoit une regie inviolable que ny luy 
mesme, ny ma mere, ny valet, ny chambriere, ne parloient en ma compaignie 
qu' autant de mots de latin que chascun avoit apprins pour iargonner avec 
moy. C'est merveille du fruict que chascun y f eit : mon pere et ma mere y 
apprinderent assez de latin pour l'entendre, et en acquirent a" suffisance pour 
s'en servir a" la necessite, comme f eirent aussi les aultres domestiques, qui 
estoient plus attacliez a" mon service. Somme, nous latinizasmes tant, qu'-il 
en regorgea iusques & nos villages tout autour, ou il y a encores, et ont prins 
pied par l'usage, plusieurs appellations latines d'artisans et d'utils. Montaigne, 
Essais, Liv. I. ch. XXV. 

In order that I may not be supposed to have borrowed from a contemporary 
who has introduced into a recent volume some of the Portuguese etymologies 
mentioned above, together with the example from Montaigne, I think it proper 
to say that all those etymologies, with two or three exceptions not material to 
the present purpose, and the illustration from the French essayist, were given 
by me in this lecture, at its delivery in November, 1858, and contained in an 
extract printed in the New York Century, in March, 1859, for the most part 
in the very words since employed by the ingenious and agreeable writer to 
whom I refer. Although credit was not given, I certainly do not imagine 
that there was any intentional appropriation of matter collected by me, and 1 
state the fact only to defend myself against a possible charge, of which I very 
cheerfully acquit the author in question. 
6* 



LECTUEE VII. 

SOURCES AND COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH. 
II. 

The English language, though by no means wanting in phi- 
lological individuality and grammatical unity, is, as we have seen, 
very heterogeneous in its vocabulary. Its harmony and coher- 
ence of structure are due to the organic vitality of its cardinal 
and fundamental element, the Anglo-Saxon tongue, which pos- 
sesses not only uncommon receptivity with reference to the 
admission of foreign ingredients, but an equally remarkable 
power of assimilating strange constituents, naturalizing them 
as we say in America, and converting them from alien, if not 
hostile, forces, into obedient and useful denizens. There is 
found elsewhere, and especially in the languages of those Orien- 
tal families upon whom the Arabs have imposed their religion 
and with it their theological dialect and their law, a great readi- 
ness to admit foreign words and foreign phrases, without mould- 
ing these linguistic acquisitions into any idiomatic conformity 
with the principles of their own structure. Arabic words are 
received into Persian and Turkish with all their anomalous in- 
flections, and whole phrases are borrowed, without any change of 
form or termination to suit them to the genius and the syntax 
of the speech that adopts them. Persons familiar with the litera- 
ture of Germany and of Scandinavia will remember that in the 
seventeenth century the languages of those countries exhibited, 
in a marked degree, a similar tendency with respect to Latin 
technical phrases and combinations, and many of our old English 
writers indulge largely in the same practice. The purism, which 
has for some time prevailed in Germany and Scandinavia, has 
expelled from their respective literatures not only foreign com- 
plex phrases, but, to a considerable extent, all words of extrane- 
(130) 



Lect. vii.] FOREIGN PHEASES. 131 

ous etymology. In English, we have no means of supplying the 
place of such expressions, and the essentially mixed character of 
the speech renders them less repugnant to our taste than they are 
iu languages so constituted as to be able to do without them. A 
large proportion of these foreign mercenaries were first employed 
in the nomenclatures of the learned professions, and many are 
still confined to them. Others have passed from the bar, the pul- 
pit, and the academic hall, into the language of common life, and 
are, though with a certain hesitation, often used by the most un- 
schooled persons. The lawyer speaks of the rule caveat 
emptor, denies the authority of an obiterdictum, con- 
tends that the onus probandi lies on the other side, dis- 
putes how far words spoken are a part of the res gestae, and 
mentions an undecided question as being still sub judice. 
These, with many more of the like sort, remain the exclusive 
property of that much suffering profession, which is condemned 

to drudge for the dregs of men, 
And scrawl strange words with a barbarous pen, 

while others have become parcel of the heritage of the lay gents, 
as lawyers call the non-professional world. The dialects of logic, 
of criticism, and of parliamentary law, have also contributed 
largely to scatter through our speech these incongruous expres- 
sions, the currency of which amounts to a confession that our 
own language is too poor to furnish a dress for many ideas which 
we have borrowed from alien sources. People who know small 
Latin make deductions a priori, a posteriori, and a 
fortiori, use arguments ad hominem, and denounce the 
conclusions of their opponents as non sequiturs; college 
graduates make affectionate mention of their alma mater; 
critics quote verbatim et literatim, and note a casual 
error of speech as a lapsus linguae; in all deliberative bodies 
resolutions are adopted, nemine contradicente, and when 
the business of the meeting is terminated, the assembly is ad- 
journed sine die; protectionists and free-traders dispute about 
ad valorem duties ; politicians hold offices ad interim, 
durante bene placito, or pro tempore; all the world 
says et cetera; and vice versa, though with a pronun- 
ciation of the Vj which comes unfortunately near a w, has even 



132 EOEEIGN PHRASES IK ENGLISH. [Lect. vn. 

entered into the vulgar Cockney dialect.* Many Greek and 
Latin nouns are employed in English with their original plurals. 
Thus we write phenomena, not phenomen^s / menioran^ per- 
haps more frequently than memoraduins • termini of a railroad 
not termmusses, and some very classical and critical persons have 
gone so far as to say omnibi for omnibuses. But all these are 
exceptional cases, and the frequent use of foreign forms and 
phrases is contrary to the genius of every cultivated language, as 
well as to the general rules of idiomatic propriety and good taste.f 
In inflected languages, declinable words, including all those 
which embody the fundamental meaning of the period, usually 
have endings which not only determine their grammatical class 
and category, but are also characteristic of the language to which 
they belong. Thus, for instance, in a Greek or Latin article, 
noun or adjective, the terminal syllables alone generally tell us the 
number, case, and gender of the word ; in a verb, the number, mood, 
tense, and voice ; and in all these parts of speech, they further in- 
form us that the radical which they qualify is Greek and not 
Latin, or the contrary. In English, on the other hand, we have 
very few endings which are indicative of the class of the word, 
of its grammatical relations, or of the etymological source from 
which it is derived. For this reason, and because also our few 
specific terminations are in many cases applied to foreign roots, 
we can never confidently pronounce upon the nationality of Eng- 
lish vocables, by the terminal syllables alone. A similar uncer- 
tainty, though in a somewhat smaller degree, prevails with respect 

* The occurrence of Latin phrases in popular Italian is easily explained, 
and they are often used in a corrupt form ; thus, the peasants of the Pistojese 
have made a verb, pisoltrare from the Latin adverbial phrase, plus ultra. 
Giuliani, Linguaggio Vivente a" Italia, gives other similar examples. 

•{•Ignis fatuus, now very common, does not appear to have been cur- 
rent in Fuller's time, for in his comment on Kuth, p. 38, he uses meteor of 
foolish fire, instead, and Marvell applies the same phrase to the glow-worm. 
We can hardly be said to have had a puristic period or school in English, 
though individual writers have occasionally manifested such a tendency. 
Mulcaster, for example, is sparing of words of Greek origin, and prefers 
the more familiar Latin, sometimes substituting for the Greek new-coined 
terms from Latin roots, in the want of flexible Saxon primitives. But these 
he conforms to the English rules of derivation, or, as he calls it, enfranchises 
them. Thus he uses severer for diaeresis, and uniter for hyphen. See Lec- 
ture xxvii. 



Lect. vii.] PARTS OF SPEECH. 133 

to prefixes and other initial syllables, and therefore, especially 
since the assimilation of the English orthography to that of the 
Continental languages, it is impossible to lay down any very pre- 
cise rules for determining, by the form of a word, whether it is 
of domestic or of alien origin. But it is, for a variety of reasons, 
desirable to be able to refer the several constituents of our lan- 
guage to their proper sources, and, in spite of the uncertainty of 
any one criterion, we may, by the use of several, including not 
the form only but the grammatical class of the word and its gen- 
eral signification, form a probable judgment as to its nation ality, 
even without a technical knowledge of etymology. 

The first and most obvious criterion with respect to the origin 
of English words, is found in the grammatical class to which they 
belong. Interjections are so much alike throughout the world, 
that none of the few we possess can be said to be exclusively 
characteristic of English, but most of our true interjections are 
doubtless of native growth. The articles, pronouns, conjunctions, 
prepositions, auxiliary verbs, the numerals* one, two, three, four, 
and so on up to million, exclusive ; the ordinals to the millionth 
exclusive ; all these are Anglo-Saxon, except the ordinal second, 
which we have borrowed from the Latin through the French. 
The simple life of the Anglo-Saxons gave them little occasion for 
numbers beyond thousands, and modern astronomy, by making 
us familiar with celestial distances, first taught us the want of 
greater numerical expressions. f The singular exception of second 
among the ordinals is due to the fact, that neither in Anglo-Saxon 
nor the cognate Mceso-G-othic and Icelandic, was there any specific 
ordinal corresponding to the numeral two, the place of such an 
one being supplied in both by other, and they counted first, other, 
third, &c, using other as we do in the phrase every other line.\ 

* Rask ranks the numerals with the pronouns, and some other grammarians 
incline to make them a class by themselves. 

f In Aelfric's Homily on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Thorpe's edi- 
tion, i. 348, we find a singular mode of expressing great numbers, by the mul- 
tiplication of $ u s e n d , the highest collective numeral in the vocabulary : 
"Ten Susend siSan hundfealde Susenda him mid wuno- 
don:" ten thousand times hundredfold thousands dwelt with him. 

\ The want of etymological relationship noticeable between the numerals and 
the ordinals is by no means exclusively characteristic of the Gothic languages. 
As the English first is not derived from one, and second is foreign altogether, 



134 NAMES OF KELATIONSHIP. [Lect. vn. 

Having thus assigned exclusively to the Anglo-Saxon one half 
the parts of speech, we have only the substantives, adjectives, 
verbs, and adverbs to deal with.* 

With respect to the signification of words as a clew to the lin- 
guistic source from which they are derived, it may be observed 
that, in general, the familiar names of the members and organs 
of the body and their functions, the words indicative of the com- 
mon duties, cares, labors, and passions of rural and domestic life, 
in short, of all those primary objects, arts, and sentiments with 
which we become acquainted, not through books, but by the daily 
round of human experience, are Saxon. In examining the vocabu- 
lary more in detail hereafter, I shall have occasion to refer again 
to this point, and I will only mention here one remarkable pecu- 
liarity with respect to English words denoting the degrees of 
family relationship. The Anglo-Saxon had its appropriate names 
for direct as well as collateral relatives, in both the ascending 
and the descending line, though, as in all dialects belonging to 
rude and patriarchal life, where the family is kept together for 
generations, the designations of all but the nearest relations of 
affinity and consanguinity were vaguely employed.^ Eow, in 

so the Latin primus and secundus are in no way connected with unus 
and duo, nor is the Greek 7rpo)Tog a derivative of hg. First, primus, and 
npioTog are respectively formed from prepositions or adverbs meaning before, so 
that first is foremost, and we find foremost for first in Mandeville and other old 
writers. 

The Anglo-Saxon forms of this word obviously point to this etymology. 
Furthest is found for first in Lord Herbert's Life, and Grower uses this form : 

And when he weneth have an ende, 
Than is he furthest to beginne. 

Gonf. Am., Pauli, II. 2. 

The Latin secundus is clearly allied to the root of sequor, I follow, and 
secundus, is following. The regiments of the English Royal Guards, true 
to the race-feeling of second to none, have long been known, not as First, Sec- 
ond, Third, but as the First, the Coldstream (where one of their battles was 
won), the Third, &c. 

* The reader will find the general relations of the Anglo-Saxon to the vocab- 
ulary of modern English ably discussed in an article in the Edinburgh Review 
for 1839. 

f Thus in the Armenian provinces of Russia, where the patriarchal system 
still subsists in full vigor, and where all the descendants remain in the family 
of the ancestor as long as he lives, the younger members are all known to 



Lect. vn.] CHARACTERISTIC LETTERS. 135 

the transition from the simple manners of the Anglo-Saxons to 
the more civilized and artificial institutions and language of their 
English successors and representatives, we have retained the 
primitive names for those relatives who, in advanced stages of 
society, usually compose one household and gather around one 
fireside ; but we have rejected the native appellations for all those 
who presumably dwell under another roof-tree, and, regarding 
them as, comparatively, strangers, have bestowed upon them for- 
eign names. Father, mother, Jnisband, wife, bridegroom, bride, 
son, daughter, brother, sister, step-father and step-mother, step-son 
and step-daughter, are all pure Anglo-Saxon ; grand-father and 
grand-mother, grand-son and gr mid-daughter, are half Romance ; 
uncle, aunt, nephew, niece and cousin, altogether so. 

The next comprehensive rule is, that monosyllables of whatever 
class, and words compounded or derived from monosyllables which 
exist independently in English, are Anglo-Saxon. To this general 
statement there are many exceptions, but these will in most cases 
be recognized by the aid of rules derived from the character of 
the initial and permanent final letters. 

As respects initial radical letters, not prefixes, it will be found 
that the following generally indicate an Anglo-Saxon origin : bl 
and br* dr,\ gl and gr, h, and especially Jen, and sh. Words be- 
ginning with ea are almost uniformly Anglo-Saxon. I remember 
no exceptions but eager, eagle, and their derivatives, and in fact, 
the same combination or that of oa, as in oak, occurring in any 
part of a word, usually indicates a Saxon root, as does also the 
semi-vowel w. Th is found only in words originally Saxon or 
Greek. 

On the other hand, the great frequency of Latin words com- 
pounded with prepositions makes it probable : That if the first 
letter be the vowel a, the word is Latin with the prefix a b , ad 

each other as brothers and sisters, and cousins are not regarded as remoter rel- 
atives than children of the same parents. — See Haxthausen, Transcaucasia. 

* The principal exceptions to this rule are blame, blanch, blank, blaspheme, 
blemish, blench ; brace, several scientific compounds and derivatives from the 
Greek fipaxiuv, branch, brief and other derivatives from the Latin b r e v i s , 
brick, brilliant, and few other doubtful or less important words. 

f Except dmpe, dress, and some others. 



136 CHAEACTEEISTIC LETTERS. [Lect. vn. 

or ante; if e followed by a consonant, Latin with the preposi- 
tion e or ex; if co, Latin with the prefix con or cum; if de, 
Latin with the prefix d e ; if i, Latin with in; if o, followed 
by a consonant, Latin with the prefix ob; if^>, Latin with the 
prefix per, prse, prseter, or pro; if. su, Latin with the 
prefix sub or s n p e r ; if r, Latin with the prefix r e . 

The diphthong ce, though employed in Anglo-Saxon, is no 
longer found in native English words, and its occurrence in any 
syllable now marks a Latin or Greek origin ; eau, oi and ou are 
almost confined to words of modern French formation, though -oid 
and -oidal terminate many words derived from the Greek, and 
they are also used as endings expressive of likeness in connection 
with roots belonging to other languages. 

A Greek etymology is indicated by the initials eu and some- 
times en y as also by ce, the prefixes apo, para, and peri, and 
sometimes pro y and by the initial combinations elir and rh y by 
ph and th occurring anywhere in a word, and in verbs, by the 
ending -ize, though this is sometimes used with Romance roots, 
as in fraternize. 

The Anglo-Saxon had several distinct terminations for adjec- 
tives, and faint traces of most of them may still be detected ; 
but those most readily recognizable are -y, as in windy, cloudy y 
-ish and -some, as in whitish, gamesome y -ful, as fearful y and 
-less, as in loveless. Of these, all but the last two are chiefly con- 
fined to Saxon roots, while -ful and -less are applied indiscrimi- 
nately to radicals from all sources, as painful, joyless* 

One of the most familiar English endings of nouns is -or, in- 

* The adverbial ending -ly is applied indiscriminately to Saxon and foreign 
roots, though, its use has been much restricted in more modern English. In the 
prologue to an old translation of the Scriptures (Wyclifhte versions, i. p. 37 n.), 
we find Ebruely, GreeJdy, Latyrdy, corresponding to the Latin Hebraic^, 
Greece, La tine, and in Wycliffe, Mark xii. 1, parably for, in parables. 

In a dialogue on Free-Masonry, ascribed to Henry VI., and printed in the 
Lives of Leland, Hearne, and Wood, Oxford, 1772, vol. I. 97, headly is used 
for chiefly, or particularly. 

" Quest. What mote ytt (Free-Masonry) be ?" 

"Ads. Ytt beeth the Skylle of Nature, the understondynge of the myghte 
that ys herynne, and its sondrye worckynges ; sonderlyche, the Skylle of 
Eectenynges, of Waightes, and Mctynges, and the treu manere of Faconnynge 
al thynges for Mannes use, headlye, Dwellynges, and Buyldynges of alle 
Kindes," &c, &c. 



Lect. til] CHARACTERISTIC LETTERS. 137 

dicative of the agent, but it is now so completely confounded 
with the Latin -or, and the French -eur, represented in 
our orthography by or and our, that it has lost its value as a 
characteristic. The nominal endings -dom and -hood, and the 
diminutive -ling, pretty certainly indicate that the word is puro 
English, while -ness and -ship, both Anglo-Saxon endings, are 
freely applied to French and Latin primitives. 

The Saxon infinitive verbs ended in -an, but since we have 
dropped this characteristic, we have no verbal endings except 
those in -ize and -ate, used with foreign roots only, and the ter- 
minations of the tenses and participles, which are applied indis- 
criminately to all verbs, without regard to etymology. If, how- 
ever, a verb is declined with what is called the strong conjuga- 
tion, or by a change of vowel, as present break, past broke, it is 
almost certainly Anglo-Saxon. 

The French or Latin endings -ous for adjectives, -ess as the 
sign of the feminine noun, -ment expressive of state or condition, 
-ance, -ty, -on, and -ude, are in most cases employed only with 
Romance roots ; and though convenience and habit have recon- 
ciled us to endearment, a Saxon radical with a Romance prefix 
and termination, we reluctantly accept new heterogeneous com- 
binations of this sort. Enlightenment, a word of like formation, 
though very much wanted, has long knocked at our door, with- 
out being yet fairly admitted to the native circle. 

Most of these rules have their exceptions, and they do not ex- 
haust the list of etymological characteristics, but I believe they 
embrace the principles of most frequent and general application, 
and they will be found sufficient to determine the origin of a 
great majority of the words of our vocabulary. 
. With the exception of Greek, as the source of most of the 
newly framed nomenclature of science, the Latin and the French 
are the only languages which have contributed any large masses 
of words to our general stock, though particular imported arts 
and processes have brought with them technical terms belonging 
to other tongues. 

It is often impossible to determine from internal evidence, 
from the form, alone, of a word of original Latin etymology, 
whether we derived it directly from its primitive source, or have 
taken it at second-hand from the French. But I think that in 



138 LATIN WOKDS IN ENGLISH. [Lect. Yll. 

most of these doubtful eases, the balance of probability is strongly 
in favor of the French, as the immediate parent ; and this I argne 
from the fact, that though the influence of the Latin had modi- 
fied the Saxon syntax, it had not, to the same extent, affected the 
general vocabulary of the people, until the Norman Conquest 
made French the official language of the government and the 
fashionable dialect of the nobility. Most old words of this class 
make their first appearance in translations from the French, as 
for instance in Chaucer's versions. 'Nov is the strict conformity 
of a word to the Latin orthography by any means a proof that it 
was first borrowed from the Latin ; for when classical literature 
became a f amiliar study in England, as it did soon after the in- 
vention of printing, very many words which had been introduced 
from France and long used with the French orthography, were 
reformed in their spelling so as to bring them nearer to their 
primitive etymology, and then a new pronunciation was often 
adopted, more accordant to the new orthography. These changes 
both in form and orthoepy are of much philological interest, but 
as I shall have occasion to examine them more fully hereafter, I 
will here content myself with a single instance. Subject was 
originally written subgette or sugette without the c, and of course 
pronounced without it, as in French. "When it was recognized 
as a Latin word, the c was restored, and the pronunciation changed 
accordingly. 

The Anglo-Saxon embodies the formative principle, and is, in 
the strongest possible sense, the organic mother of the English' 
language. I repeat, in the strongest sense, because, although we 
have admitted a great number of foreign words — so great, in fact, 
that we may be said to have two parallel vocabularies and to have 
created a language within a language — yet, after all, in the essen- 
tial characters of speech, there is a closer resemblance between 
our modern dialect and Saxon than between Italian and Latin, 
although there are few Italian words not derived from the Latin. 
Indeed, this double form of our language, with respect to what 
are called lexicaMa, or mere etymology, is a fact altogether unique 
in European philology. We possess a garment which, remaining 
always the same in form, may yet be worn either side out, throw- 
ing up now the warp and now the woof, and presenting almost a 
complete diversity of colors as well as of tissue, and we have the 



Lect. vn.] ANGLO-SAXON ELEMENT. 139 

rare facility of so modifying our complexion, as to be entitled to 
lay claim to exclusive cousinship with either the Gothic or the 
Eomance families, and yet sail the whole time under the Saxon 
fla<y. It is true that while we can readily frame a sentence whol- 
ly in Ano-lo-Saxon, we cannot easily do the same with words en- 
tirely Latin, because the determinative particles and auxiliaries, 
the bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure, must be Saxon. In 
borrowing Latin words, we brought with them neither their in- 
flections nor their particles, and, therefore, though we may make 
them the ashlar of the period, yet both the mortar and the bond 
are always English. 

The following extract from Macaulay's article in the Edinburgh 
Beview, on Croker's Boswell, well illustrates the difference be- 
tween a Saxon English and a Latinized diction : 

" Johnson's conversation appears to have been quite equal to his writings in 
matter, and far. superior to them in manner. When he talked, he clothed his 
■wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions. As soon as he took his 
pen in his hand to write for the public, his style became systematically vicious. 
All his books are written in a learned language — in a language which nobody 
hears from his mother or his nurse — in a language in which nobody ever quar- 
rels, or drives bargains, or makes love — in a language in which nobody ever 
thinks. It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in which 
he wrote. The expressions which came first to his tongue were simple, ener- 
getic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences 
out of English into Johnsonese. His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale 
are the original of that work of which the Journey to the Hebrides is the 
translation, and it is amusing to compare the two versions. ' When we were 
taken up stairs, ' says he in one of his letters, ' a dirty fellow bounced out of 
the bed on which one of us was to lie.' This incident is recorded in the Jour- 
ney as follows : ' Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose, started 
up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge.' Sometimes 
Johnson translated aloud. 'The Rehearsal,' he said, very unjustly, 'has not 
wit enough to keep it sweet ' ; then, after a pause, ' It has not vitality enough 
to preserve it from putrefaction." 

In the first of the two periods just quoted, the style is charac- 
terized as unidiomatic, quite as much by the suspension of the 
sense in consequence of the complicated inversion, " Out of one 
of the beds, started up, at our entrance, a man," as by the selec- 
tion of the words which compose it. 

Many languages are so copious and so flexible, that the same 
tiling, or nearly the same thing, may be said in several different 



140 ANGLO-SAXON ELEMENT. [Lect. vn. 

forms, but there are few, if any, where the range of expression is so 
great as in English. Take, for example, two or three good Eng- 
lish translations of a foreign author, and you will generally find 
them, though perhaps equally true to the original, yet very widely 
different from each other, both in vocabulary and in structure of 
period. This may happen in different ways. One translator may 
choose his words from the Saxon, the other from the Latin stock, 
or they may incorporate into their respective styles the two ele- 
ments in equal proportions, but differ in their selection of synony- 
mous expressions ; or again, they may prefer, the one a structure 
of period formed more upon classical, the other more upon indi- 
genous models. 

In spite of the necessity of frequently introducing determina- 
tives in languages with few inflections, it will in general be found 
that a given period, framed wholly in Anglo-Saxon, will contain 
as few words, perhaps even fewer, than the same thought ex- 
pressed in the Romance dialect of English. The reason of this is 
that the unpleasant effect of the frequent recurrence of particles 
has obliged us to invent forms of expression in which such mem- 
bers, though grammatically required to complete the period, are 
dispensed with, and we use those forms with less repugnance in 
Saxon combinations where they were first employed, than in 
Latin ones, which are of later introduction and less familiar 
structure. Thus we say, ' The man I bought the house of,' ' the 
man we were talking of,' and we may, with equal grammatical 
propriety, say, 'the gentleman I purchased the house of,' 'the 
person we were conversing of; but we should be much more 
likely to employ a more formal syntax, ' the gentleman of whom 
I purchased the house,' ' the person of whom we were conversing.' 
Again, one would say, ' I told him I had called on General Tay- 
lor,' omitting the conjunction that, before the second member of 
the period ; but if we employed Romance words, we should more 
probably retain the conjunction, as, ' I informed him that I had 
paid my respects to the President.' Although, then, the Anglo- 
Saxon so far controls all other elements that we may grammati- 
cally employ foreign words in the same way as native ones, yet a 
half -unconscious sense of linguistic congruity usually suggests a 
more formal structure of the period when it is composed chiefly 
of Romance radicals. 



Lect. vii.] ANGLO-SAXON ELEMENT. 141 

Our best proverbs and proverbial phrases, especially the alliter- 
ative and rhyming ones, our pithy saws, our most striking similes 
and descriptive expressions, and our favorite quotations, are in 
general, wholly, or in a very large proportion, made up of native 
English words. Take for example these quotations from Scripture : 

" Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." 

" His hand shall be against every man, and every man's hand against him." 

" Bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave." 

"I have been young, and now am old ; yet have I not seen the righteous 

forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." 

" If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning." 
" Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." 
" Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days." 
"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." 
"And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into 

pruuing-hooks." 

" Therefore, whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so 

to them"; and so, the popular version of this law : — "Do as you would be 

done by." 

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy 

soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind. Thou shalt love thy 

neighbor as thyself." 

In these quotations, as well as in hundreds of others from the 
same exalted source, every word, with the doubtful exception of 
pruning, is Saxon. So, these proverbs are expressed wholly 
in native English : 

When you are an anvil, hold you still ; 

When you are a hammer, strike your fill. 

If you do not want to go into the stove, lie athwart the door. 

Be not a baker, if your head be of butter. 

The horse thinks one thing ; he that rides him another. 

The singing-man keeps his shop in his throat. 

One nail drives out another. 

"Where an important thought, a maxim or illustration, has been 
uttered by equally high authorities in the Saxon and the Latin 
idiom, the former acquires established popular currency. The 
parable of the man who built his house upon the sand is given us 
by both Matthew and Luke, and the two narratives are identical 
in their facts. Matthew, as rendered by the authorized transla- 
tion, gives the catastrophe in plain Saxon-English : 

"And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and 
beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it." — Matt. vii. 27. 



142 ANGLO-SAXON ELEMENT. [Lect. vn. 

The learned evangelist Luke employed a more classic style of 
narrative, and the translators have endeavored to give the effect 
of this by a less idiomatic and more ornate Latinized diction : 

"Against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell, 
and the ruin of that house was great." — Luke vi. 49. 

The narrative of Matthew specifies two circumstances omitted 
by Luke, "the rain descended," and "the winds blew." In the 
former phrase our translators employed the Latin word "de- 
scended" in order to avoid the repetition of the verb "fell" 
which was needed in the subsequent clause describing the fall of 
the house, but otherwise the words are all Saxon. 

In the corresponding passage in Luke, there are three emphatic 
Latin words, vehemently, immediately, and ruin. ]^ow let us 
compare the two passages, and say which, to every English ear, is 
the most impressive : 

"And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and 
beat upon that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it." 

" Against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell, 
and the ruin of that house was great." 

There can scarcely be a difference of opinion as to the relative 
force and beauty of the two versions, and accordingly we find 
that while that of Matthew has become proverbial, the narrative 
of Luke is seldom or never quoted.* 

* It may be interesting to compare the Greek text of these two passages with 
the Mceso-Gothic, and the early Anglican versions. I give the Greek (Scholz's 
text) and Tyndale's translation from Bagster's Hexapla, London, 1841 ; the 
Mosso-Gothic from Gabelentz and Loebe, the Anglo-Saxon from Klipstein, and 
Wyclifie from the Wyclmite versions, Oxford, 1850. 

From Matthew vii. 27. 

Kcu na-eftr) r/ fipoxv nal t]7j&ov ol Trorajuol, nal eirvevoav ol avefioc, nal Trpooenoipav 
ry oinla kneivr), teal ansae- nal rjv rj irroxng avTJjg fxeyaAij. 

Mceso-Gothic of Ulphilas. 

Jah ati'ddja dalab rign jah qemun awos jah vaivoun vindos jah bistugqun 
bi jainamma razna jah gadraus jah vas drus 'is mikils. 

Anglo-Saxon. 

Tha rinde hyt, and thaer com flod, and bleowon windas, and ahruron on 
thaet hus ; and thaet hus feoll, and hys hryre was mycel. 



Lect. vn.] ENGLISH OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTUET. 143 

I cannot, upon this occasion, enter npon the history of the 
primary amalgamation of the incongruous elements which com- 
pose the English speech, for this would involve a minuteness of 
detail, and an amount of grammatical discussion, that would not 
be otherwise than fatiguing ; but it will not be irrelevant to our 
present purpose to make a few observations upon the change 
which took place in the fourteenth century, and which impressed 
upon our language many of the most striking features that distin- 
guish it from the Anglo-Saxon. The work of Langland called 
Piers Ploughman's Yision, and its sequel, the Creed, are of this 
century ; but, both in poetic form and in vocabulary, they belong, 
not indeed to the Anglo-Saxon, but to the transition, or what may 
be called the tentative or experimental period, when the new 
speech was striving to detect and bring out its own latent affini- 
ties and tendencies. Besides, the diction and syntax of those 
works are marked by peculiarities which are, with apparently 
good reason, held to be characteristic rather of certain local dia- 
lects than of the general idiom of the period. English literature 
must therefore be considered as commencing with the writings of 

Wycliffe. 
And rayn came doun, and floodis camen, and wyndis blewen, and thei hur- 
liden in to that hous ; and it f elle doun, and the f allyng doun thereof was grete. 

Tyndale. 
And abundaunce of rayne descended, and the fiuddes came, and the wyndes 
blewe and beet vpon that housse, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. 

From Luke vi. 49. 
7] Trpocepprj^EV 6 7rora/zdf, teal ev&etog eirece, nal iyevero to pfjy/ia r?jg oiKcag kneivrjg 
ueya. 

Mreso-GoTHic of Ulphilas. 

ppatei bistagq nodus jah suns gadraus, jah varp so usvalteins pis raznis 
mikla. 

Anglo-Saxon. 

And thaet flod in-fleow, and hraedlice hyt afeoll ; and wearth mycel hryre 
thaes huses. 

Wyclifpe. 

In to which the flood was hurlid, and a non it felde doun ; and the fallinge 
doun of that hous is maad greet. 

Tyndale. 
Agaynst which the fludde did bet ; and it fell by and by. And the fall of 
that housse was greate. 



144: DIALECT OF CHAUCEE. [Lect. vn. 

"Wycliffe, Gower, and Chaucer. The advance of Wycliffe * upon 
Langland is chiefly grammatical, not lexical ; at least, the differ- 
ence in the proportion of foreign words used by them respectively 
is inconsiderable. The influence of Continental secular literature, 
as distinguished from the style and diction of theological composi- 
tions, is hardly traceable in Wycliffe, but very conspicuous in his 
poetical contemporaries. The crown of England, in the best days 
of Edward III., numbered perhaps as many French as British 
subjects, and its Continental territory, where French only was 
native, was scarcely less extensive than its English soil. The two 
languages had existed in England side by side for three whole 
centuries, and the Norman dialect was the favorite speech of 
court and aristocratic life. That Chaucer, himself a courtier, 
should have imbibed a large infusion of the French element, was 
natural, and copying, too, from foreign models and translating 
from foreign authors, it was inevitable that his diction should ex- 
hibit traces of French influence. Chaucer accordingly used a 
number of French and Gallicized Latin words not found in other 
English writers of his time, and there is no doubt that many of 
them have been retained upon his authority in place of equally 
appropriate and expressive Saxon terms. So far, therefore, the 
charge often preferred against him of having alloyed the language 
by the introduction of French words and idioms, though by no 
means true in its whole extent, is not absolutely without founda- 
tion, but at the same time his syntax remained substantially and 
essentially Saxon, and a comparison of his poems with those of 
other writers of the period will show that the poetic dialect of our 
speech, its flexibility, compass, and variety of expression, were 

* I am not disposed to allow that the name of "Wycliffe was but a myth, the 
impersonation of a school of reformers, and I think we may well be slow in 
adopting the theory which reconciles the discrepancies between the different 
accounts of the life of the great English apostle, by the supposition that there 
were two or more Wycliffes, as in Greek mythology there was a plurality of 
Herakles. Still, the extreme uncertainty of the evidence which identifies any 
existing manuscript as an actual production of the translator Wycliffe, and the 
great stylistic differences between the works usually ascribed to him, require 
us to use great caution in speaking of the characteristics of his diction. In 
general, when I cite the authority of Wycliffe, I refer to the elder of the two 
versions of the New Testament printed in the Wycliffe translations, Oxford, 
1850. 



Lect. vh.] ENGLISH OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 145 

developed by him to such an extraordinary degree, that there are 
few instances in the history of literature where a single writer 
has exerted so great, and in one direction at least, so beneficial an 
influence on the language of his time, as Chaucer. Langland, 
Gower, Chaucer, and Wycliffe belong chronologically to the same 
period, but the secular poets and the religious reformers moved 
in different spheres, addressed themselves to different audiences, 
and the vocabulary and style of each are modified by the circum- 
stances under which he wrote, and the subject on which he was 
employed. Gower and Chaucer, writing for ladies and cavaliers, 
used the phraseology most likely to be intelligible and acceptable 
to courtiers, while Wycliffe and the author of the Ploughman 
were aiming to bring before the popular mind the word of God 
and the abuses of the church. The vocabulary of the reformers, 
both in prose and verse, is drawn ahnost wholly from homely 
Anglo-Saxon and the habitual language of religious life, while the 
lays of Gower and Chaucer are more freely decorated with the 
flowers of an exotic and artificial phraseology.* Wy cliff e and his 

* Notwithstanding the amount of poetical embellishment in Chaucer's 
works, he actually employs a smaller percentage of Latin and French words 
than the author of Piers Ploughman, though the general difference in this 
respect is perhaps less than the computation given in Lecture VI. would indi- 
cate. The dialect of Piers Ploughman has been popularly supposed to be more 
thoroughly Anglo-Saxon than that of Chaucer, because the former uses very 
many native words not found in the latter, and which are now obsolete ; but 
in point of fact, Chaucer's style is quite as idiomatic as that of Langland, if 
tried by either an Anglo-Saxon or a modern English standard. 

There is no doubt a strong resemblance between the general diction of this 
poet and of Gower. The etymological proportions of their vocabularies are 
not widely different, nor are the grammatical discordances between them very 
great. But in the choice of words as determined by subject, in metrical con- 
struction, in poetic coloring, in compass, variety, beauty, and appositeness of 
illustration, in dramatic power, in nice perception of character, and in justness 
of thought, the superiority of Chaucer is almost immeasurable. A reader who 
should note the passages in his works, which in point of thought or expression 
are particularly suited to serve as effective quotations, would find on reviewing 
his list, that no English writer except Shakespeare, has uttered so many strik- 
ing and pithy sentences as Chaucer. 

Few of his greater qualities were inherited by his immediate successors. 
The influence of his style is perceptible enough in the poetic diction of all after 
ages ; but it is strange that the following century should have given birth to 
almost nothing better than what, in spite of the ingenious arguments of Skel- 
ton's defenders, I must still characterize as the wretched ribaldry of that 
author. 



146 ENGLISH OF THE FOTTKTEENTH CENTUKY. [Lect. vn. 

associates, in their biblical translations, use few foreign words not 
transplanted directly from the Latin Vulgate, but in their own 
original writings they employ as large a proportion of Romance 
vocables as occurs in those of Chaucer's works where they are 
most numerous. In the Squire's Tale, nine per cent, of the 
words are of Continental origin, in the ISTonnes Prestes Tale the 
proportion falls to seven, while in the prose Persones Tale,* a re- 
ligious homily, it rises to eleven. The diction of Chaucer in the 
Persones Tale does not differ very essentially from that of other 
religious writers of the same period. It is by no means the pro- 
portion of foreign words which distinguishes the dialect of Chau- 
cer's poems from the common literary dialect of the times. It is 
the selection of his vocabulary, and the structure of his periods, 
that mark his style as his own, and it is a curious fact, that of the 
small number of foreign words employed by him and by Gower, 
a large share were in a manner forced upon them by the neces- 
sities of rhyme ; for while not less than ninety parts in a hundred 
of their vocabularies are pure Anglo-Saxon, more than one-fourth 
of the terminal words of their verses are Latin or French. 

Englishmen have sometimes looked back with regret to the 
loss of the splendid conquests of Edward III., and the older Eng- 
lish provinces on the east and south of the channel, but there can 
be little doubt that the surrender of territory was a gain, so far as 
respects the unity and harmony of national character, the devel- 
opment of the language, and the creation of an independent litera- 
ture. The first effect of the great victories of that reign, no 
doubt, was to stimulate the national pride of England, and to 
clothe every thing properly indigenous with new respectability 
and value. It is perhaps to this feeling that we are to ascribe 
the statute of the thirty-ninth year of Edward III., which pre- 
scribed that pleas should be pleaded, as well as debated and 
judged, in English, though they were to be enrolled in Latin. 
The self-conscious spirit of Anglo-Saxon nationality was for the 
moment thoroughly roused, but the nobility and gentry were 

* The Persones Tale is substantially a version of a Latin work of Albertano 
di Brescia, composed about the middle of the thirteenth century and translated 
into the Tuscan dialect a very few years later. By singular good fortune, 
this work of Albertano's is thus among the earliest prose monuments of both 
English and Italian literature. 






LECT. vii.] ENGLISH OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTUKY. 147 

largely of Norman extraction, and still attached to their heredi- 
tary speech. The statute does not appear to have been much re- 
garded in practice, and French and Latin continued to be the 
official languages, for a long time after. From the ]STorman Con- 
quest to the twenty-fifth year of Edward I., 1297, all parliamen- 
tary enactments were recorded and promulgated in Latin. From 
that date to the third year of Henry YIL, in 1487, they are 
almost wholly in French, and thereafter only in English, but the 
records of judicial proceedings were made up in Latin down to 
a much later date ; and in fact England was never thoroughly 
Anglicized, until its political connection with the continent was 
completely severed. 

" Had the Plantagenets," observes Macaulay, " as at one time 
seemed likely, succeeded in uniting all France under their gov- 
ernment, it is probable that England would never have had an 
independent existence. The noble language of Milton and Burke 
would have remained a rustic dialect without a literature, a fixed 
grammar, or a fixed orthography, and would have been contemptu- 
ously abandoned to the boors. No man of English extraction 
would have risen to eminence, except by becoming in speech and 
in habits a Frenchman." 

Analogous, though certainly not identical, consequences, would 
have followed from the failure of the Kef ormers to release Eng- 
land from her allegiance to the Papal see ; for the mighty intel- 
lectual struggle, which shook Christendom in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, had a powerful influence in rousing the English mind to 
vigorous action, throwing it back on its own resources, and com- 
pelling it to bring out whatever of strength and efficiency was 
inherent in the national mind and the national speech. Tyndale's 
Testament was, for its time, as important a gift to the English 
people, as was King James's translation (of which indeed Tyn- 
dale's forms the staple), fourscore years later ; and in the theo- 
logical controversies of that century our mother-tongue acquired 
and put forth a compass of vocabulary, a force and beauty of dic- 
tion, and a power of precise logical expression, of which scarce 
any other European tongue was then capable, and which the best 
English writers of later centuries can hardly be said to have sur- 
passed. 



LECTURE VIII. 

THE VOCABULAEY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



The Anglo-Saxon represents at once the material substratum 
and the formative principle of the English language. You may 
eliminate all the other ingredients, and there still subsists a speech, 
of itself sufficient for all the great purposes of temporal and spir- 
itual life, and capable of such growth and development from its 
own native sources, and by its own inherent strength, as to fit it 
also for all the factitious wants and new-found conveniences of 
the most artificial stages of human society. If, on the other 
hand, you strike out the Saxon element, there remains but a jum- 
ble of articulate sounds without coherence, syntactic relation, or 
intelligible significance. But though possessed of this inexhausti- 
ble mine of native metal, we have rifled the whole orbis ver- 
horum, the world of words, to augment our overflowing stores, 
so that every speech and nation under heaven has contributed 
some jewels to enrich our cabinet, or, at the least, some humble im- 
plement to facilitate the communication essential to the proper 
discharge of the duties, and the performance of the labors, of 
moral and material life. These foreign conquests, indeed, have 
not been achieved, these foreign treasures won, without some 
shedding of Saxon blood, some sacrificing of domestic coin, and 
if we have gained largely in vocabulary, we have, for the time at 
least, lost no small portion of that original constructive power, 
whereby we could have fabricated a nomenclature scarcely less 
wide and diversified than that which we have borrowed from so 
distant and multiplied sources. English no longer exercises, though 
we may hope it still possesses, the protean gift of transformation, 
which could at pleasure verbalize a noun, whether substantive 
or adjective, and the contrary ; we have dropped the variety of 
(148) 






Lect. yhi.] LOSSES AND GAINS OF ENGLISH. 149 

significant endings, which indicated not only the grammatical char- 
acter, but the grammatical relations, of the words of the period, 
and with them sacrificed the power of varying the arrangement 
of the sentence according to the emphasis, so as always to use the 
right word in the right place ; we have suffered to perish a great 
multitude of forcible descriptive terms ; and finally we no longer 
enjoy the convenience of framing at pleasure new words out of 
old and familiar material, by known rules of derivation and com- 
position, but are able to increase our vocabulary only by borrow- 
ing from foreign and, for the most part, unallied sources. Nev- 
ertheless, in the opinion of able judges, our gains, upon the whole, 
so far at least as the vocabulary is concerned, more than balance 
our losses. Our language has become more copious, more flexi- 
ble, more refined, and capable of greater philosophical precision 
and a wider variety of expression. 

The introduction of foreign words and foreign idioms has made 
English less easy of complete mastery to ourselves, and its mixed 
character is one reason why, in general, even educated English 
and Americans speak less well than Continental scholars ; but, on 
the other hand, the same composite structure renders it less diffi- 
cult for foreigners, and thus it is eminently fitted to be the 
speech of two nations, one of which counts among its subjects, 
the other among its citizens, people of every language and every 
chme. 

Our losses are greatest in the poetic dialect, nor have they, in 
this department, except for didactic and epic verse, been at all 
balanced by our acquisitions from the Latin and the French, or 
rather from the former through the latter. We have suffered in 
the vocabulary suited to idyllic and to rural poetry, in the lan- 
guage of the domestic affections, and the sensibilities of every- 
day social life. In short, while the nomenclature of art has been 
enriched, the voice of nature has grown thin and poor ; and at 
the same time, in the loss of the soft inflections of the Saxon 
grammar, English prosody has sustained an injury which no va- 
riety of foreign terminations can compensate. The recovery and 
restoration of very many half-forgotten and wholly unsupplied 
Saxon words, and of some of the melodious endings which gave 
such variety and charm to rhyme, is yet possible, and it is here 
that I look for one of the greatest benefits to our literature from 



150 LOSSES OF ENGLISH. [Lect. vin. 

the study of our ancient mother-tongue. Even Chaucer, whom 
a week's labor will make almost as intelligible as Dryden, might 
furnish our bards an ample harvest, and a knowledge of the ex- 
isting remains of Anglo-Saxon literature would enable us to give to 
our poetic vocabulary and our rhythm a compass and a beauty sur- 
passed by that of no modern tongue. It is remarkable that Ben 
Jonson, in lamenting the disappearance of the old verbal plural 
ending -en, as, they loven, they complainen, instead of they love, 
they complain — a form which he says he " dares not presume to 
set afoot again, though the lack thereof, well considered, will be 
found a great blemish to our tongue," — should confine the ex- 
pression of his regret solely to the loss of a grammatical sign, 
without adverting to the superior rhythmical beauty and conveni- 
ence of the obsolete form. Early English inherited from the 
Saxon numerous terminations of case, number, and person, with 
an obscure vowel or liquid final, constituting trochaic feet, and 
the loss of these has compelled us to substitute spondaic measures 
to an extent which singularly interferes with the melody of our 
versification. Thus in Chaucer's time, the adjectives all, small, 
and the like, and the preterite of the strong verbs, had a form in e 
obscure, which served as a sign of the plural. The e final in 
these and other words was articulated as it now is in French poe- 
try, except before words beginning with a vowel or with h, and 
thus what we should write and pronounce, prosaically, 

And small fowls make melody 

That sleep all the night with open eye, 

becomes metrical as written by Chaucer, and pronounced by his 
contemporaries : 

And smalS f owlSs maken melodle, 

That slepen al thS night with open yhe. 

But this point will be more properly considered in a subsequent 
part of our course. 

It has been observed in all literatures, that the poetry and the 
prose which take the strongest hold of the heart of a nation are 
usually somewhat archaic in diction ; behind, rather than in ad- 
vance of, the fashionable language of the time. They are the 
mellow wine of the national thought : " the old is better." The 
reason of this is that the great mass of every people is slow to 



Lect. Yin.] AECHAIC DICTION. 151 

adopt changes in its vocabulary. New words are introduced, and 
long exclusively employed, in circles that are rather excrescences 
upon society than essential constituents of it ; while old words 
cling to the tongue of the stable multitude, and are understood 
and felt by it long after they have ceased to be current and intel- 
ligible among the changeful coteries that assume to dictate the 
speech, as. well as the opinions and the manners, of their genera- 
tion. Deep in the recesses of our being, beneath even the reach 
of consciousness, or at least of objective self -inspection, there lies 
a certain sensibility to the organic laws of our mother-tongue, and 
to the primary significance of its vocabulary, which tells us when 
obsolete, unf amihar words are fitly used ; and the logical power 
of interpreting words by the context, acts with the greatest swift- 
ness and certainty when it is brought to bear on the material of 
our native speech. The popular mind shrinks from new words, 
as from aliens not yet rightfully entitled to a place in our com- 
munity, while antiquated and half-forgotten native vocables, like 
trusty friends returning after an absence so long that their features 
are but dimly remembered, are welcomed with double warmth, 
when once their history and their worth are brought back to our 
recollection. So tenaciously do ancient words and ancient forms 
adhere to the national mind, that persons of little culture, but of 
good linguistic perceptions, will not unfrequently follow old Eng- 
lish or Scottish authors with greater intelligence than will gram- 
marians trained to the exact study of written forms, and I have 
known self-educated women, who read Chaucer and Burns with a 
relish and an appreciation rare among persons well schooled in 
classic lore. 

Doubtless the too free use of archaisms is an abuse ; but the 
errors which have been committed by modern writers in this way 
have generally been not so much in employing too large a pro- 
portion of older words, as in applying them to new objects, 
thoughts, and conditions. 

The author of " Nothing to "Wear " would have committed a 
serious violation of the laws of propriety and good taste, if he had 
adopted the dialect of the sixteenth century in that fine satire, to 
which, what is currently called the local color of the composition 
gives so much point. On the other hand, the judicious use of 
antiquated words and forms in the Castle of Indolence, an im- 



152 ARCHAIC DICTION. [Lect. vin. 

aginative conception altogether in harmony with the tone of an 
earlier age, has clothed that exquisite creation with a charm which 
renders it more attractive than almost any other poetical produc- 
tion of the last century. 

The English author who has most affected archaism of phrase- 
ology is Spenser, but if he had confined himself to the use of 
roots and inflections which ever were true English, . instead of 
coining words and forms to suit his metre and his rhyme, he 
would have escaped something of the censure which his supposed 
too conservative love of the reverend and the old brought upon 
him, at the close of a period during which, more than ever after 
the time of Chaucer, the language had been in a state of meta- 
morphosis and transition.* 

* Spenser wanted not able defenders in his own time, and the argument of 
one of them is worth listening to as an exposition of the views of a good scholar, 
at an important crisis in the history of the English language, and as in itself a 
characteristic specimen of the euphuism which was then a fashionable style of 
literary composition. 

"And first of the wordes to speake, I graunt they bee something hard, and 
of most men unused, yet both English, and also used of most excellent au- 
thours, and most famous poets. On whom, when as this our Poet hath bin 
much travailed and thoroughly read, how could he be (as that worthie Oratour 
sayde), but that walking in the Sunne, although for other cause he walked, 
yet needes he mought be sunburnt ; and having the sound of those auncient 
poets still ringing in his eares, he mought needes, in singing, hit out some of 
their tunes. 

" Sure I thinke, and thinke I think not amisse, that they bring great grace, 
and, as one would say, authoritie to the verse. For albe, amongst many other 
faults, it specially be obiected of Valla against Livie, and of other against 
Salust, that with over much studie they affect antiquitie, as covering thereby 
credence and honour of elder yeares ; yet I am of opinion, and eke the best 
learned are of the like, that those auncient solemne words are a great ornament, 
both in the one, and in the other. 

"Ofttimes an ancient worde maketh the stile seeme grave, and as it were 
reverend, no otherwise than we honor and reverence gray haires for a certaine 
religious regard which we have of old age. 

" But if any will rashly blame his purpose in choice of olde and unwonted 
wordes, him may I more iustly blame and condemne, or of witlesse headiness 
in iudging, or of heedless hardiness in condemning, for in my opinion it is one 
especiall praise, of many which are due to this poet, that he hath labored to 
restore as to their rightful heritage such good and naturall English wordes, as 
have beene long time out of use, and almost cleane disherited. Which is the 
only cause, that our mother-tongue, which truly of itself is both full inough 
f 01 prose and stately enough for verse, hath long time beene counted most bare 



Lect. viil] CHANGES IN VOCABTTLAKY. 153 

Ben Jonson sings : 

"Then it chimes, 
When the old words do strike on the new times," 

and he has happily conceived, and happily expressed in prose, the 
true rule for the selection of words in writings designed for per- 
manence of duration and effect. 

" We must not," says he, " be too frequent with the mint, every 
day coining, nor fetch words from the extreme and utmost ages. 
Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, 
and are not without their delight sometimes. For they have the 
authority of years, and out of their intermission do win to them- 
selves a kind of grace-like newness. But the eldest of the present, 
and newest of the past language is best." 

To ascertain the number of words in use at auy given time, is 
a matter of great difficulty. As I have observed in a former lec- 
ture, new words are constantly making their appearance, and of 
these, while the greater part are forgotten with the occasions 
which produced them, some, from the great importance and abid- 
ing influence of those events, or from their own inherent expres- 
siveness, become permanent additions to the language. The in- 
troduction of new words can scarcely fail to be marked, but the 
disappearance of old and established expressions is not a thing of 
so easy observation. The mere non-user of a word is not likely 
to be noticed until it has been so long out of currency that it 
strikes us as unfamiliar when met with in authors of an earlier 
period. ISTor does the fact, that a word is not actually employed 
at a particular epoch, prove it to be permanently obsolete. 

and barren of both. Which default when as some endeavoured to salve and 
recure, they patched up the holes with peeces and rags of other languages, bor- 
rowing here of the French, there of the Italian, every where of the Latin ; 
not weighing how all these tongues accord with themselves but much worse 
with ours : so now they have made our English tong a gallimaufry, or hodge- 
podge of all other speeches. 

" Other, some not so well seene in the English tongue, as perhaps in other 
languages, if they happen to hear an olde word, albeit very naturall and sig- 
nificant, cry out straightway, that we speake no English but gibberish, or rather 
such as in olde time Evander's mother spake ; whose first shame is that they 
are not ashamed, in their own mother-tongue to be counted strangers and aliens. 
The second shame no less than the first, that whatso they understand not, they 
streightway deeme to be senselesse and not at all to be understoode." 
7* 



154 CHANGES IN MEANING OF WOEDS. [Lect. vni. 

Multa renascentur quae jam cecidere, cadentque, 
Quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula. 

"Words are constantly passing temporarily ont of use, and re- 
suming their place in literature again; and this occasional sus- 
pended animation of words, followed by a revival and restoration 
to full activity, is one of the most curious facts in their history. 
But this subject belongs to another part of our course, and we 
shall resume it hereafter. We can never overlook at once our 
whole contemporaneous literature, and of course we can never say 
how extensive its active vocabulary is, nor how far its gains, which 
we see and can estimate, are compensated by losses which escape 
our notice. Such computations no generation can make for itself, 
and the balance can be struck only by the successor. 

There is one verbal revolution which is more within the scope 
of familiar observation. I refer to that change by which words 
once refined, elegant, and even solemn, come to suggest trivial, 
vulgar, or ludicrous thoughts or images. Spenser, in speaking of 
an encounter between two armies or single knights, often says, 
they " let drive," or " rushed full drive, at each other," and both 
he and later writers, even to the time of Dryden, describe, in pa- 
thetic passages, a lady as having her face " blubbered with tears." 
The phrase " not to be named the same day," now very inelegant, 
occurs in Abel Redivivus ; and the grave Hooker warns sinners 
of the danger of " popping down into the pit." Fellow, origi- 
nally meaning simply a companion, is now often a term of 
offence. Hooker and Shakespeare use companion, now become 
respectable, as expressive of contempt, in the same way as we use 
fellow, and it is remarkable that in almost all the European lan- 
guages, the word corresponding to fellow is employed chiefly in a 
disparaging signification, as in German, Gesell / in Italian, Chi 
e questo eompagno f 

Party, for person, now a vulgarism, occurs in the Memorials 
of the Empire of Japan, published by the Hakluyt Society, p. 
55, and very frequently in Holland and other authors of his time. 
" Apelles, not knowing the name of the jpartie who had brought 
him thither," &c, &c. * * " but the king presently tooke know- 
ledge thereby of the partie that had played this pranke by him," 
&q., &c. Holland's Pliny, II. 539, E. 



Lect. yiii.] CHANGES IN USE OF WOEDS. 155 

When a distinguished American politician expressed a willing- 
ness, under certain circumstances, to " let the Constitution slide," 
he was criticised almost as severely for the undignified character 
of the expression, as for the supposed unpatriotic sentiment ; but 
he had the authority of Chaucer and Shakespeare for the lan- 
guage, if not for the thought. Young Lord Walter, in the 
Clerkes Tale, was so devoted to hawking, that 

Wei neigh all other cures let he slyde ; 

the disconsolate Dorigene in the Erankeleines Tale was fain at 

last to 

Lete hire sorwe slide ; 

and Sly, in the Taming of the Shrew, 

Lets the world slide. 
Gower also, II. 3, says : 



Thus haue I lette time slide 
For slouthe ; 



and again, III. 61 : 



The high creator * * 
* * * * 

Full many wonder worldes chaunce 

Let slide under his sufferaunce. 

Yery many humble colloquialisms current in this country, but 
not now used in England, and generally supposed to be American- 
isms, are, after all, of good old British family, and our Eastern 
friends, who are sometimes ridiculed for talking of a sight of peo- 
ple, may find comfort in learning that the famous old romance, 
the prose Morte d' Arthur, uses this word for multitude, and that 
the high-born dame, Juliana Berners, lady prioress of the nunnery 
of Sopwell in the fifteenth century, informs us that in her time a 
oornynable syght of monkes was elegant English for, ' a large 
company of friars.' Dampier, 1703, has " clear round"; and 
also fix apparently in the New England sense. " We went ashore 
and dried our cloaths, cleaned our guns, dried our ammunition, 
and^fcztf ourselves against our enemies if we should be attacked." 



156 EXTENT OF VOCABTTLAKY. [Lect. vih. 

To feel of, occurs in Knox's Ceilon bearing the date 1681. 
" They usually gather them before they be full ripe, boreing an 
hole in them, said feeling of the kernel, they know if they be ripe 
enough for their purpose." 

Tonguey (tungy), formerly common, and still sometimes used, 
in New England in the sense of fluent in speech, eloquent, occurs 
in the older text of the Wychffe version of Ecclesiasticus. The 
later text hsus jcmglere instead. 

No living language yet possesses a dictionary so complete as to 
give all the words in use at any one period, still less all those that 
have belonged to it during the whole extent of its literary history. 
We cannot therefore arrive at any precise results as to the com- 
parative copiousness of our own and other languages, but there is 
reason to think that the vocabulary of English is among the most 
extensive now employed by man. 

The nmnber of English words not yet obsolete, but found in 
good authors or in approved usage by correct speakers, including 
the nomenclature of science and the arts, does not probably fall 
short of one hundred thousand.'* Now there are persons who 
know this vocabulary in nearly its whole extent, but they under- 
stand a large proportion of it much as they are acquainted with 
Greek or Latin, that is, as the dialect of books or of special arts 
or professions, and not as a living speech, the common language 
of daily and hourly thought. Or if, like some celebrated English 
and American orators, living and dead, they are able, upon occa- 
sion, to bring into the field in the war of words even the half of 
this vast array of light and heavy troops, yet they habitually con- 
tent themselves with a much less imposing display of verbal force, 
and use for ordinary purposes but a very small proportion of the 
words they have at their command. Out of our immense maga- 
zine of words and their combinations, every man selects his own 
implements and weapons, and we should find in the verbal reper- 
tory of each individual, were it once fairly laid open to us, a key 
that would unlock many mysteries of his particular humanity, 



* In this estimate I include technical terms only so far as they have become 
a part of the general vocabulary of all cultivated persons. If we add all the 
special terms of every science and every art, the number of English words 
would be far beyond one hundred thousand. 






Lect. vin.] VOCABTTLAKY OF INDIVIDUALS. 157 

many secrets of his private history, so that ' by his words he 
might be justified, and by his words he might be condemned.' 

Few writers or speakers use as many as ten thousand words, 
ordinary persons of fair intelligence not above three or four thou- 
sand. If a scholar were to be required to name, without examin- 
ation, the authors whose English vocabulary was the largest, he 
would probably specify the all-embracing Shakespeare, and the all- 
knowing Milton. And yet in all the works of the great dramatist, 
there occur not more than fifteen thousand words, in the poems 
of Milton not above eight thousand. The whole number of 
Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols does not exceed eight hundred, 
and the entire Italian operatic vocabulary has been said to be 
scarcely more extensive. 

To those whose attention has not been turned to the subject, 
these are surprising facts, but if we run over a few pages of a 
dictionary, and observe how great a proportion of the words are 
such as we do not ourselves individually use, we shall be forced 
to conclude that we each find a very limited vocabulary sufficient 
for our own purposes. Although we have few words absolutely 
synonymous, yet every important thought, image, and feeling 
has numerous allied, if not equivalent, forms of expression, and 
out of these every man appropriates and almost exclusively em- 
ploys those which most closely accord with his own mental con- 
stitution, his tastes and opinions, the style of his favorite authors, 
or which best accommodate themselves to the rest of his habitual 
phraseology. One man will say a thankful heart, another a 
grateful spirit ; one usually employs fancy where another would 
say imagination y one describes a friend as a person of a sanguine 
temperament^ another speaks of him as a man of a hopeful spirit y 
one regards a winter passage around Cape Horn as a very hazard- 
ous voyage, another considers it a peculiarly dangerous trip. 
One man begins to build, another commences building* Men of 

* Commence is used by good writers only as a transitive verb, and as such 
requires the participle or participial noun, not the infinitive, after it. The 
phrase I commence to build, now occasionally employed, is therefore not sanc- 
tioned by respectable authority. At the same time there is no valid grammati- 
cal objection to its use. The French, from whom we borrowed this verb, say 
commeucer d parler, or cornmencer de parler, according to circumstances, and 
our restriction of it to a technically transitive character is purely conventional. 



158 TECHNICAL TEEMS. [Lect. vni. 

moderate passions employ few epithets, with verbs and substan- 
tives of mild significations ; excitable men use numerous inten- 
sives, and words of strong and stirring meanings. Loose thinkers 
content themselves with a single expression for a large class of re- 
lated ideas ; logical men scrupulously select the precise word 
which corresponds to the thought they utter, and yet among per- 
sons of but average intelligence, each understands, though not 
himself employing, the vocabulary of all the rest. The demands 
of pure and of physical science, and of mechanical art, for a more 
extended nomenclature wherewith to chronicle their progress and 
aid in their diffusion, are at present giving occasion to a more 
ample coinage of new words than are supplied from any other 
source. Science, with the exception of Geology, borrows its 
vocabulary chiefly from Greek and Latin sources; mechanical 
art, to some extent from the same languages, but it has more 
generally taken its technical terms from native, though often 
very obscure, roots. The number of words of art which the last 
half century has thus introduced into English is very great, and a 
large proportion of them are sought for in vain in our most 
voluminous dictionaries. Indeed, it is surprising how slowly the 
commonest mechanical terms find their way into dictionaries pro- 
fessedly complete. I may mention, as instances of this, that 
penny, & denomination of the sizes of nails, as a six-penny, or a 
ten-penny nail, though it was employed by Featly two hundred 
years ago, and has been in constant use ever since, is not to be 
found in Webster ; * and the great French and Italian dictionary 

* "He fell fierce and foule upon the Pope himself e, threatning to loosen 
him from his chayre, though he were fastened thereto with a tenpeny naile." — 
Life of Abbot, Abel Redivivus, 546. 

Six-penny, eight-penny, ten-penny nails, are nails of such sizes, that a thou- 
sand will weigh six, eight, or ten pounds, and in this phrase, therefore, penny 
seems to be a corruption of pound. 

Weidenfeld, Secrets of the Adepts, uses penny for duodecimal part : " Of the 
white likewise, one was to be of ten-penny, another of eleven, another of ster- 
ling silver," &c, &c. — Address to Students (15). Here ten-penny silver is silver 
ten-twelfths fine. 

There is a very common and very proper expression, pair of stairs, which 
the dictionaries and the sciolistic pride of precisians in speech generally reject 
as a vulgar inaccuracy. This phrase is used by Palsgrave, Hakluyt, Shake- 
speare, and George Sandys, and it is found in the Memoirs of Scriblerus, as well 
as in many English classics of the best age of our literature. The fancied in- 



Lect. vni.] . SCIENTIFIC VOCABULARY. 159 

of Alberti, in the edition of 1835, does not contain the word for 
steam-loat in either language. 

The rapid advance of the natural sciences has required, in all 
European languages, the creation of a great number of new words 
to designate new scientific ideas and newly discovered material 
objects. On the formation of this nomenclature, different philo- 
logical principles have been adopted at different times and by dif- 

c (Directness lies in a supposed misapprehension of the meaning of stair, which 
those who criticize the phrase imagine to be synonymous with step or tread. 
But this is a mistake. The Anglo-Saxon stseger, whence our stair, is de- 
rived from the verb s t i g a n , to ascend or climb, which, in the form sty or stie, 
was in use as an English verb as late as the time of Spenser. S t ae g e r and 
stair, though sometimes confounded with step, properly signify alike the entire 
system of successive steps by which we sty or climb from one floor to another, 
and they may therefore be considered as collective nouns. Thus Milton, Para- 
dise Lost, iii., 540-3 : 

Satan from hence, now on the lower stair, 
That scaled by steps of gold to heaven gate, 
Looks down with wonder at the sudden view 
Of all this world at once. 

But it is usual to divide the stair, when the height of the stories is consider- 
able, into flights or sections separated by landing-places, and each flight might 
not improperly be considered an independent stair. Now in the great majority 
of stairs, there was but one intermediate landing-place, and of course the whole 
ascent from floor to floor was divided into two flights or stairs, and thus formed 
a pair of stairs. 

In the Supplement to the last edition of Webster, in which this expression 
is justified, it is suggested that it originated in the use of pair to designate, not 
a couple, but ''any number of pares, or equal things that go together"; as "a 
pair (set) of chessmen, a pair (pack) of cards." This is a plausible, and per- 
haps the true explanation ; but nevertheless, as stairs did not mean steps, but 
flights of steps, I think the theory I have proposed upon the whole more prob- 
able. The Gloss, of Arch. , I. 242, gives this quotation from William of Wor- 
cester :* "a hygh grese called a steyr of xxxii. steppys," which corresponds to 
Milton's use of the words. 

The French use the prepositions d e and e n to express the relation between 
an object and the material of which it is made : as, un point de pier re un 
palais en marbre, une statue en bronze. Doubtless the prepo- 
sition d e is the more proper of the two ; nevertheless, e n is very fre- 
quently employed instead, both colloquially and by many of the best writers 
in the language. But neither in the French-English Dictionary of Fleming 
and Tibbins, nor in the much more complete Dictionnaire National of Bescher- 
elle, is this use of the preposition e n noticed. 

* See Arnold's Chronicle, p. 116. 



160 SCIENTIFIC VOCABULARY. [Lect. vnx. 

f erent nations. So far as we can penetrate the darkness which 
surrounds the origin of language, the names of all objects, whether 
animate or inanimate, appear to have been originally, if not imi- 
tative, at least descriptive. The earliest modern European nat- 
uralists did not resort directly to imitation, but framed new 
words from Greek or Latin roots to compose their nomenclature. 
Many languages have a great number of terms of unknown, or at 
least of disputed, etymology which are employed as descriptive 
appellations of natural formations, for example, polinje, tundra, 
steppe, fjall as, asarpl, cluse, wadi, have been largely employed 
as convenient terms, not only in their widely separated birth- 
places, but in almost all European languages, to designate objects 
familiar to modern geographers. There are two schools of 
nomenclature in modern science ; one forms such barbarous terms 
as acanthopterygii pharingognathi from Greek primitives fami- 
liar to classic scholars, but which in their compound form would 
have sorely puzzled an ancient Greek naturalist ; the other school, 
embracing chiefly the Germans and Scandinavians, though em- 
ploying native and intelligible roots as its material, is even more 
obscure in its terminology than the former. There is a third 
class of word-makers who prefer to employ the name of scientific 
observers as appellatives of objects belonging to them by right of 
discovery. Thus we have Gay-Lussacia, and Asa-Graea, as the 
names of botanic genera, introduced to the learned world by Gay- 
Lussac, and Prof . Asa Gray. There is still another class of names, 
which, like Lucus a non lucendo, are bestowed upon objects on 
account not of the possession but of the absence of the properties 
which might be expected to distinguish them. Thus eucalyptus 
is applied to an Australian tree, not because its foliage is abundant, 
but because, on the contrary, it appears to the eye unusually bare 
of leaves. The almost indiscriminate use of so many different 
systems, has led to great confusion iu the vocabulary of modern 
science, and it is not strange that modern philosophers should 
have agreed in thinking it important to devise a system by which 
more precision should be given to the terminology of natural 
science, and that its technical vocabulary should be capable of 
readily accommodating itself to the orthography of the principal 
European languages, and thus become substantially universal. 
The nomenclature of science is founded upon the necessity, 



Lect. viii.] SCIENTIFIC VOCABTJLAKY. 161 

partly of new names for new things, and partly of more precise 
and exclusive designation of well-known things. It is obvious 
that when chemistry discovers a new element or elementary com- 
bination, physics a new law or principle, mathematics a new mode 
of ascertaining magnitudes or comparing quantities, new words 
must be coined in order properly to express the object discovered 
or process invented ; but the need of new terms for familiar 
things, or properties of things, is not so clear to common appre- 
hension. It is not at first sight evident that a botanist, in describ- 
ing a smooth, shaggy, or bristly vegetable surface, is under the 
necessity of saying instead, that the leaf or stalk is glabrous, hir- 
sute, or hispid ; but a sufficient reason for the introduction of 
new terms into newly organized branches of knowledge, is to be 
found in the fact, that the common words of every living speech 
are popularly used in several distinct acceptations, some proper 
and some figurative. The purposes of natural science require that 
its nomenclature shall be capable of exact definition, and that every 
descriptive technical term be rigorously limited to the expression 
of the precise quality or mode of action to the designation of 
which it is applied. Now, though smooth, shaggy, and bristly 
may be, and often are, employed in senses precisely equivalent 
to those of glabrous, hirsute, and hispid, yet they have also 
other meanings and shades of meaning, and are almost always 
more or less vague in their signification, because, being relative 
in their nature, they are constantly referred to different 'standards 
of comparison. The Latin words which, in the dialect of botany, 
replace them, have, on the contrary, no signification except that 
which is imposed upon them by strict definition, and no degree 
of signification which is not fixed by reference to known and in- 
variable types. 

In a recent scientific journal, I find this sentence : " Begonia- 
cese, by their anthero-connectival fabric indicate a close relation- 
ship with anonaceo-hyclrocharideo-nymphseoid forms, an affinity 
confirmed by the serpentarioid flexuoso-nodulous stem, the lirio- 
dendroid stipules, and cissoid and victorioid foliage of a certain 
Begonia, and if considered hypogynous, would, in their trique- 
trous capsule, alate seed, apetalism, and tufted stamination repre- 
sent the floral fabric of Nepenthes, itself of aristolochioid affinity, 
while by its pitchered leaves, directly belonging to Sarracenias 
and Dionseas." 



162 TECHNICAL TEEMS. [Lect. vni. 

And again, in Brandes' Dictionary : " Illecebracece (Illece- 
brum, one of the genera). A small natural order of hypogynous 
Exogens, belonging to the Silenal alliance, allied to JPortulacacew, 
Caryophllacece and Amaranthacece, and distinguished by having 
both calyx and corolla present and symmetrical, the latter rudi- 
mentary, and by its scarious stipules and amphitropal ovules. 
They are plants of no importance." 

These extracts exemplify, in an instructive way, the applica- 
tion of new words to objects and features familiar in themselves, 
but which have only recently acquired a scientific value, and are 
interesting as showing to what extent the formation of compound 
and derivative words may be carried in English, when employed 
in the service of natural knowledge. Most of the descriptive 
epithets are derived from the scientific appellations of known 
species or genera, the names of which suggest to the botanist 
their characteristic forms. Where the particular form is common 
to two or three, the names of all are grouped in one compound, 
and the whole word terminated with the Greek syllable -oid, ex- 
pressive of likeness. 

Every one will recognize the immense advantage of the chemi- 
cal scientific prefixes, per, bi, ob, sub, super, and the terminals, 
ate, ide, ure, ic, ous, with, to us moderns, ^significant roots. 
And yet with all this effort after exactness by the coinage of new 
terms, Quatrefages complains that the old words, class, race, spe- 
cies, tribe, family, &c, are too vague to serve the purpose of 
scientific discrimination. That they are at least very vaguely used, 
every reader of scientific books will readily testify. 

The nomenclature of science is often so repugnant to the ear, 
and so refractory to the tongue of our Anglican race, that it 
never finds admission into the dialect of common life, but as the 
principles of abstract reasoning, and the facts of natural knowl- 
edge become more widely diffused, much of the vocabulary which 
belonged originally to the schools, escapes from its learned seclu- 
sion, and, generally with more or less modification of meaning, 
finally incorporates itself into the common language, the familiar 
speech of the people. At present the predominance of scientific 
pursuits is bestowing upon English a great number of words bor- 
rowed from the nomenclature, both of the various branches of 
natural history and of the more exact sciences of pure and mixed 






Lect. vni.] TECHNICAL TEEMS. 163 

mathematics. Thus, conditions, in the sense of the circumstances 
under which a given phenomenon takes place, and which may be 
supposed to modify its character, problem, corollary, phenome- 
non, quantitative and qualitative, demonstrative, positive and 
negative, the mean between extremes, antipodal, zenith, inverse 
ratio, and hundreds of other terms lately introduced for the 
special purposes of science, and denoting new, or at least unfami- 
liar, things and relations of things, have now become a part of the 
general vocabulary of all educated persons.* 

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the questions which 
absorbed the thoughts of men, and shook the dynasties of Europe, 
were not those immediately affecting material interests, but those 
concerning the relations of man to his Maker, and of the subject 
to his rulers. Theology and civil polity, and, as a necessary prepara- 
tion for the comprehension of both, metaphysical studies, were 
the almost exclusive pursuit of the great thinkers, the active in- 
tellects of that long period. The facts, the arguments, the 
authorities which bore upon these questions, were principally to 
be sought for in the ancient languages, and when the reasoning 
was to be employed to influence the unlearned, to be clothed in 
an English dress, and to be popularized, so to speak, it was at 
once discovered that the existing language was destitute of appro- 
priate words to convey ideas so new to the English mind. The 
power of forming new words from indigenous roots by compo- 
sition and derivation, retained by the cognate languages, had been 
lost or suspended in English ; and, moreover, the Saxon primi- 
tives specially adapted for employment in this way, had been 
superseded by French words imported by the Norman nobility, 
or by a sectarian Latin phraseology introduced by the Romish 
ecclesiastics. Hence new vocables, and those almost uniformly of 
Greek or Latin etymology, were coined for use in theological and 
political discussion, and many of them soon became a constituent 
part of the general medium of thought. In fact, a complete 

* Exorbitant, the Latin conjugate verb to which, exorbito, acquired a 
popular figurative sense even in the classic age of Eome, was originally a term 
of art applied to those heavenly bodies whose path deviated much from the 
plane of the orbits of the planets most familiar to ancient astronomy. It has 
now lost its technical meaning altogether, and has no longer a place in the dia- 
lect of science. 



164 TECHNICAL TEEMS. [Lect. vm. 

English metaphysical nomenclature was formed, and freely and 
f amiliarly used, by the great thinkers who lived in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. In the materialistic age which fol- 
lowed, such portion of this vocabulary as was not already incorpo- 
rated into the universal patrimony of the language, had become 
obsolete, and when, fifty years ago, Coleridge attempted to revive 
the forgotten study of metaphysics, he found that the current dia- 
lect of the day afforded no terms for the adequate expression of 
logical and philosophical categories. But a recurrence to the re- 
ligious philosophy of a more intellectual age, showed that the 
English metaphysicians of that period had, in great part, antici- 
pated a nomenclature which has been supposed to be the inven- 
tion of German speculators and their followers. Reason and 
understanding, as words denominative of distinct faculties, the 
adjectives sensuous, transcendental, subjective and objective, 
supernatural as an appellation of the spiritual — or that imma- 
terial essence which is not subject to the law of cause and effect, 
and is thus distinguished from that which is natural — are all words 
revived, not invented by the school of Coleridge.* 

In the mean time, and down to the present day, the rapid pro- 
gress of physical science and industrial art has given birth to a 
great multitude of technical terms, a large part of which, in more 
or less appropriate applications, or in figurative senses, has entered 
into the speech of every-day life. Thus the means of articulate 
and written communication upon more familiar as well as more 
recondite subjects have been vastly extended, even since the period 
when Shakespeare showed, by an experimental test, that English 
was already capable of exhibiting almost every conceivable phase 
of internal and external being in our common humanity. 

*The following extract from Sir Kenelm Digby's Observations on Sir 
Thomas Browne's Religio Medici is, both in manner and in matter, worthy of 
some much later metaphysicians : 

"If God should join the Soul of a lately dead man (even whilest his dead 
corps should lie entire in his winding sheet here), unto a body made of earth 
taken from some mountain in America, it were most true and certain that the 
body he then should live by, were the same identical body he lived with before 
his death and late resurrection. It is evident that sameness, thisness, and that- 
ness, belongeth not to matter by itself (for a general indifference runneth 
through it all) ; but only as it is distinguished and individuated by the form, 
which in our case whensoever the soul doth, it must be understood always to 
be the same matter and body." 



Lect. vm.] POPTTLAE VOCABULAEY. 165 

The permanent literature of a given period is not a trne index 
of the general vocabulary of the period, for the exemption of 
great works from the fleeting interests and passions that inspire 
the words of their own times, is one of the very circumstances 
that insure their permanence. That which is to live for ever 
must appeal to more catholic and lasting sympathies than those im- 
mediately belonging to the special concerns of any era, however 
pregnant it may be with great consequences to the weal or the 
woe of man. 

The dialects of the field, the market, and the fireside in former 
ages have left but an imperfect record behind them, and they are 
generally to be traced only in the scanty pages of the comic 
dramatist, and in the few fragments of private correspondence 
that antiquarian curiosity has rescued from destruction. But, for 
a century, the historical novel, and the periodical press, in its 
various forms of newspaper, solid review, and light magazine, 
have embodied the mutable speech of the hour, in its widest 
range of vocabulary, phraseological expression, and proverb. 
While, therefore, we do not possess satisfactory means of testing 
the humors, the aims, the morals of our remoter ancestors by the 
character of their familiar speech, we have, in the lighter litera- 
ture of later years, ample means of detecting the unconscious ex- 
pression of the mental and moral tendencies, which have marked 
the age of our fathers and our own. 



LECTURE IX. 

VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

n. 

Foe the purpose of obtaining a comprehensive view of partic- 
ular branches of knowledge, and of determining the special rela- 
tions which subsist between them all, modern science has found 
the form of generalization termed classification, a very efficient, 
not to say a necessary, instrument. In fact orderly, and what 
may be called progressive, arrangement, is considered so essential 
a feature in all scientific method, that the principles of classifica- 
tion have been made the subject of much profound investigation 
and philosophic discussion, and they may be said to have been 
erected into a science of themselves. As an auxiliary to the com- 
prehension of a given classification, and especially as a help to the 
memory in retaining it, a systematic, and as some hold, so far as 
possible a descriptive, nomenclature is indispensable. The wide 
range of recent physical science, and the extent to which, in its 
various applications, it enters into and pervades the social life of 
the age, have made its dialect in some sort a common medium of 
intercommunication between men of different races and tongues. 
And thus Linnaeus, the father of modern botany and zoology, and 
Lavoisier, who occupies a scarcely less conspicuous position in the 
history of modern chemistry, have indirectly exercised almost as 
important an influence on the language, as, directly, upon the 
science of succeeding generations. A full discussion of the prin- 
ciples of scientific nomenclature would be too wide a digression 
from the path of inquiry marked out for the present course, but 
it will be useful to notice some misapplications of them, and I 
shall have occasion to recur again to the subject, in treating of the 
parts of speech.* 

* See Lecture xiv. 
(166) 



Lect. rx.] SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 167 

I will precede what I have now to say in relation to it, by some 
remarks on the classification of language's, and on derivation and 
composition in English. Languages have been variously classed 
according to their elements, their structure, their power of self- 
development, their historical origin or their geographical distribu- 
tion. But the application of scientific principle to the comparison 
of different languages, or families of language, is so new a study 
that no one system of arrangement can yet be said to have re- 
ceived the assent of scholars, in any other way than as a provis- 
ional distribution. The nomenclature of the different branches of 
linguistic knowledge, phonology, derivative etymology, inflection 
and syntax, is perhaps still more unsettled, and almost every Con- 
tinental grammarian proposes a new set of names for even the 
parts of speech. So far is the passion for anatomizing, describ- 
ing, and naming, carried, that some philologists, as for instance 
Becker, divide, subdivide, distinguish, and specify language and 
its elements, until it is almost a greater effort to master and retain 
the analysis and its nomenclature, than to learn the grammatical 
forms and syntactical rules of the speech to which they are ap- 
plied. I doubt the practical value of methods so artificial as to 
elevate the technicalities of art above art itself, and I shall, 
throughout this course, which I have more than once described 
as altogether introductory and preparatory, confine myself, as far 
as practicable, to old and familiar appellations of all that belongs 
to the description of language and the elements which compose it. 

Among the various classifications of language, not the most 
scientific certainly, but one of the most obvious, is that which 
looks at them with reference to their power of enlarging their 
vocabulary by varying and compounding native radicals, or in 
other words, their organic law of growth. This classification is 
incomplete, because it respects words considered as independent 
and individual, leaving syntactical structure and other important 
points altogether out of view ; but, as we are now considering the 
vocabulary, it is for our present purpose the most convenient 
arrangement. 

Derivation, in its broadest sense, includes all processes by which 
new words are formed from given roots. In ordinary language, 
however, grammatical inflections are not embraced in the term, 
and it may be added, that where the primitive and the derivative 



168 DEEIVATION OF WOEDS. [Lect. IX. 

belong to the same language, there is usually a change of form, a 
change of grammatical class, and a change of relative import.* I 
shall, at present, speak only of derivation from native roots. A 
radical, which, in its simplest form and use, serves only as an at- 
tributive, in other words an adjective, may be made to denote the 
quality which it ascribes, or an act by which that quality is mani- 
fested or imparted, and thus become a noun or a verb ; or contra- 
riwise, a root which affirms the doing of an act, the being in a 
state, or the consciousness of a sensation or emotion, and of course 
a verb, may become the name of an agent, a quality, or a condi- 
tion. Thus, to take the first case supposed, red is the simplest 
form in which that root is known to the English language, and in 
that form it is an adjective denoting that the object to which it is 
applied possesses a certain color. If we add to this root the syl- 
lable -ness, forming the derivative redness, the new word means 
the power of producing upon the eye the sensation excited by red 
objects ; it becomes the name of that color, and is a substantive. 
If instead of that ending, we add the syllable -den, which gives us 
redden, the derivative signifies to become red, or to make red, and 
is a verb. So in the other case, the verb admire, (which for the 
present purpose may be treated as a radical,) signifying to regard 
with wonder or surprise mingled with respect or affection, by the 
addition of the consonant -r, becomes a substantive, admirer, and 
denotes a person entertaining the sentiment I have just defined. 
In the form admiration, it is also a substantive, indicating the con- 
sciousness or expression of that sentiment, and if changed to 
admirable, it becomes an adjective expressing the possession of 
qualities which excite admiration, or entitle objects to be admired. 
In all these cases, the modified words are said to be derived from, 
or to be derivatives of, the simple radical, and they are changed 
in form by the addition of a syllable. But the change of form 
may be made in a different way, namely, by the substitution of 

* Hence the notion of grammar as a test of identity of language — whether it 
is an ethnological test is quite another question. 

There is not always a change of form, as will be seen hereafter, nor is there 
necessarily a change of grammatical class. The noun auctioneer is derived 
from the noun auction ; and again, since is derived from sithence, and that 
from a still older form, without any change of either class or meaning. See 
Lecture xiv. 



Lect. ix.] DERIVATION OF WORDS. 169 

other letters, usually vowels, for some of those of the radical. Thus 
from the verb hind, we have, by a change of vowel, the substan- 
tives band and bond, all expressing the same radical notion ; from 
the verb think, by a change of both vowel and consonant, the 
substantive thought; from the verb see, by a like change, the 
substantive sight ; from the verb to freeze, the substantive y/wtfy 
from the substantive glass and grass, by a change of the spoken 
not the written vowel, the verbs to glaze and to graze. Thus far 
the change of grammatical class has been indicated by a change 
of form, and tins is the usual but not the constant process of der- 
ivation. There are still many instances, and in earlier stages of 
English there were many more, where a radical is employed in a 
new class, without a change of form. Thus the substantive man, 
without the alteration of a letter, becomes a verb, and we may say 
to mam a ship ; so from arm, to arm a fortress / from saddle, bit, 
and bridle, to saddle, bit, or bridle a horse ; and the Morte d' Ar- 
thur speaks of a knight as being well sworded and well shielded, 
using participial forms which imply the verbs to sword, and to 
shield* 

Composition in etymology means the forming of one word out 
of two or more, with or without change of form in either. In 
words framed by composition, each of the constituents may pos- 
sess and still retain an independent significance, as for example 
in steam-ship, in which instance each half of the word has just 
the same sense as when employed by itself, though, in order to 
complete the meaning of the compound, something must be men- 
tally supplied, understood, as English grammarians say, or as the 
Latins more happily express it, subauditum, underheard. 
In this case, the defect of meaning is in the want of connection 
between the two halves of the word, steam and ship, and a for- 
eigner, unacquainted with the rules of English composition, an 

* In many cases of this sort the modern verb has been formed from an Anglo- 
Saxon word of the same etymology and grammatical class, by dropping the 
characteristic verbal ending -an; in others, it is altogether of recent origin, 
and so long as it has existed as a verb, it has been identical in form with its 
primitive noun. 

Our American to progress is one of the few verbalized nouns of recent coin- 
age. It has not much to recommend it besides its novelty, but it seems likely 
to secure full recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. See further, Lecture 
xiv. 

8 



170 COMPOSITION OF WOEDS. [Lbct. ix. 

Italian for instance, would not be able to perceive bow tbe Eng- 
lisb meaning could be given to tbe compound by tbe mere jux- 
taposition of its elements, any more tban by saying v a p o r e - 
1 e g n o , wbicb would express nothing.* So long as tbis word 
was a new one, every English hearer supplied the notion of the 
elastic force of steam acting as the motive power of the ship, 
though now, both the name and the thing are so familiar, that 
steamship does not always suggest its own etymology. This 
mode of composition is more appropriately called agglutination, 
and in the language of some rude peoples it is carried so far, that 
all the members of a period may be incorporated into one word, 
which alone expresses an entire proposition. There are, how- 
ever, as I shall show in treating the subject of inflections, many 
highly refined and cultivated languages, where nearly the same 
thing is effected by a mere change in the form of an uncom- 
pounded word.f In the majority of compound words in the 
European languages, the component parts are not all separately 
significant, but the word consists of a principal radical, the sense 
of which is reversed, extended, limited, specificated, or otherwise 
qualified, by combining with it a particle, or other determinative, 
not of itself expressive of a state, quality, or act. Of this class 
of compounds, we have few purely English examples, the Saxon 
inseparable particles, and the prepositions and adverbs used as 
qualificatives in composition, having become chiefly obsolete or 
limited in their employment, and the place of the native words 
into which they entered having been supplied by French or Lat- 
in compounds ready-made to our hands. ;(: 

* The French use proper and sometimes common nouns as a sort of ad- 
jective or qualificative, or, it may be said, in forming compounds, as : papier- 
Frumeau, gants-Jonvin. 

The Italians do the same, the qualificative following the noun qualified, and 
they are now carrying the process further. Thus I saw recently in a shop 
window at Milan, a card : guanti paglia donna — ladies' straw-colored gloves. 

f In speaking of polysyllabic inflectional forms as uncompounded, I do not 
mean to express dissent from the theory that weak inflections generally result 
from the coalescence of particles or pronouns with verbal roots. As, how- 
ever, the source and history of such formations is in most cases unknown, the 
inflections of cultivated languages must, in practice, be regarded as having 
lost the character of compounds, and this is especially true where old and 
established inflectional endings are applied to words of recent origin or intro- 
duction. See Lecture xv. 

% We have still some Saxon qualificatives left, and it is much to be desired 



Lect. ix.] CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES. 171 

There are languages whose vocabulary is chiefly made up of 
primitive words, and of words which by simple and obvious rules 
are derived from, or composed of, primitives. These primitives 
or radicals are usually monosyllables indigenous to the language, 
and still existing in it as independent words. There are other 
tongues whose stock of words is of a composite character, and in 
a considerable degree borrowed from foreign languages, or de- 
rived from native roots now obsolete or so changed in form, in 
the processes of derivation and composition, that they are no 
longer readily recognized as the source of the word. Languages 
of the former class freely allow the formation of new words both 
by derivation and by composition ; those of the latter reluctantly 
admit a resort to either of these methods of enriching the vocabu- 
lary, and prefer rather to enlarge their stock by borrowing from 
foreign tongues, than to develop and modify, by organic pro- 
cesses, the significance of their own primitives. Of course, here 
and elsewhere, I use primitive in a very restricted sense, and by 
no means as implying that the roots to which we refer European 
words are necessarily or even probably aboriginal, but simply 
that they have no known and demonstrable historical descent 
from distant or apparently remotely related tongues, and there- 
fore stand in the place of primitives to the vocabulary which is 
composed, or has grown out of them. 

To the former of the two classes I have mentioned, that, 
namely, where most of the words are either primitive or derived 
by obvious processes from roots familiar to every native, belong 
the Greek, the German, the Icelandic, and the Anglo-Saxon ; to 
the latter, that is, where the radicals of the words are often obso- 
lete or their derivation obscure, belong the Latin, and in a still 
higher degree, what are called the Romance languages, or those 

that the use of them may be extended. Thus, we precede radical verbs, sub- 
stantives, and adjectives, by the negative or privative syllable, un-, as in the 
words to undo, unbeliever, unknown ; the inseparable particle mis-, as in mis- 
apprehend, mis-place, mis-apply, mis-call ; the adverbs of place, out, up, and 
down ; as in out-side, up-liold, down-fall; the prefix be- as in be-dew, bestrew. 
In these last instances, the particle be- retains its original force, and it was 
formerly much more extensively used, such words as be-bled, for covered with 
blood, be-powdered for sprinkled with powder, being very common, but in 
most modern words with this prefix, it has ceased to modify the meaning of 
the radical appreciably. In Chapman's Iliad, Book xiv. 1. 13, forefeet occurs. 



172 ANGLO-SAXON GOSPELS. [Lect. ix. 

derived from Latin.* English occupies a place between the two, 
but perhaps less resembles the former than the latter, particularly 
as it shares with these much of their incapacity of forming at will 
new words from familiar roots. The power of derivation and 
composition was eminently characteristic of our maternal Anglo- 
Saxon, but was much diminished upon the introduction of Nor- 
man French, or to speak- more justly, the Latin element, which 
refused to accommodate itself to this organic faculty of the Saxon 
tongue. A comparison of the Anglo-Saxon translation of the 
Gospels with the received version, is instructive on this point. 
The latter is distinguished for its freedom from Latinisms, and 
was made with constant reference to the Greek, and with an evi- 
dent design sedulously to avoid unnecessary coincidences of ex- 
pression with the Yulgate and the older translations made from 
it. The Anglo-Saxon version was taken from the Itala or the 
Yulgate, and probably, though this is not certain, without any 
opportunity of comparison with translations in other languages, 
and yet its vocabulary is almost purely of native growth. Even 
the special words characteristic of the civil and political life of 
Judea, and of the Jewish and Christian religions, are very gener- 
ally supplied by indigenous words, simple or compound, of cor- 
responding etymology. The standard English version adopts, 
without translation, the words prophet, scribe, sepulchre, centuri- 
on, baptize, synagogue, resurrection, disciple, parable, treasure, 
pharisee, whereas the Anglo Saxon employs, instead, native words, 
often no doubt framed for this special purpose. Thus, for prophet 
we have w i t e g a , a wise or knowing man ; for scribe, b o c e r e , 
book-man ; for sepulchre, b y r g e n , whence our words bury, and 
barrow in the sense of funeral-mound ; for centurion, hundred- 
man, the etymological equivalent of the Latin centurio; for 
baptize, f u 1 1 i a n ; for synagogue, gesamnung, congregation ; 
for resurrection, serist, uprising; for disciple, leorning- 
c n i h t , learning-youth ; for parable, b i g s p e 1 , the German 
Beispiel, example ; for treasure, gold-hord; for pharisee, 
sunder -halga, over-holy. The word employed as the equiva- 
lent of repentance, or the Latin pcenitentia, is remarkable, 

* Classical Latin bears the same relation to the Romance languages and dia- 
lects, as does Sanscrit to the Aryan — not the source but the purest representa- 
tive of the class. 



Lect. ix.] COMPOSITION OF WORDS. 173 

because it does not involve the notion of penance, a ceremonial 
or disciplinary satisfaction, which is a characteristic of the Romish 
theology and which seems implied even in the Lutheran Busse 
thun. The Anglo-Saxon dse dbote don dse dbote, which 
are used for repent and repentance, convey the idea of making 
satisfaction or compensation, not to the church, but to the party 
wronged ; and therefore, if not proper translations of the corre- 
sponding words in the Greek text, they are departures from the 
Vulgate. I cannot but regard these facts as an argument of some 
weight in support of the theory which maintains that the primi- 
tive English church was substantially independent of the papal 
see. 

Our present power of derivation and composition is much re- 
stricted, and while many other living languages can change all 
nouns, substantive and adjective, into each other or into verbs, 
and vice versa, still retaining the root-form which makes the new- 
coined word at once understood by every native ear, we, on the 
contrary, are constantly obliged to resort to compounds of foreign 
and to us unmeaning roots, whenever we wish to express a com- 
plex idea by a single word. The German and other cognate lan- 
guages still retain this command over their own hereditary re- 
sources, and in point of ready intelligibility and picturesqueness 
of expression, they have thus an important advantage over lan- 
guages which, like the Latin and its derivatives, possess less plastic 
power. There are, in all the Gothic tongues, numerous com- 
pounds, of very obvious etymology, which are most eminently 
expressive, considered as a part of what may be called the nature- 
speech of man, as contrasted with that which is more appropri- 
ately the dialect of literature and art ; and thus those languages 
are very rich, just where, as I remarked in a former lecture, our 
own is growing poor. The vocabulary belonging to the affections, 
the terms descriptive of the spontaneous action of the intellectual 
and moral faculties, the pictorial words which bring the material 
creation vividly before us, these in the languages in question are 
all more numerous, more forcible than the Latin terms by which 
we have too often supplied their places. 

The facility of derivation and composition in the Greek and 
Gothic languages is almost unlimited, and a native, once master 
of the radicals and fully possessed of the laws of forma- 



174: INSEPAKABLE PAETICLES. [Lect. ix. 

tion, can at any time extemporize a word for the precise expres- 
sion of any complete idea lie may choose to embody in a single 
vocable. Aristophanes has a word of fourteen syllables, from six 
radicals, signifying meanly-rising-early-anol-hurrying-to-the-trib u- 
nal^to-denounGe-anotherfor-oyn-infraotion-ofa-law-oonoerning-the^ 
exportation-offigs, so that one word expresses an idea, the trans- 
lation of which into English occupies twenty-two. In another 
case, the same dramatist coins a word of seventy-two syllables, as 
the name of a dish composed of a great number of ingredients, 
and Richter quotes Forster as authority for a Sanscrit compound 
of one hundred and fifty-two syllables. Yoss has framed a Ger- 
man equivalent for the first mentioned of these sesquipedalia 
verba,* eighteen-inch words, as Horace calls them, and the 
German word, like the Greek, is, in this and other similar cases, 
an example of agglutination rather than technical etymological 
composition. In the Gothic languages, the elements of the com- 
pound are not generally very numerous, but Icelandic, Anglo-Sax- 
on, and German have many very forcible inseparable particles and. 
modes of composition, by which wonderful life and vigor are im- 
parted to language. Thus in Icelandic, the particle of, too much, 
is instinct with meaning, and when a man of lower rank reproved 
his foster-son, a Norwegian king, for indiscreetly conferring too 
high rank on a subject, he administered a more pointed rebuke 
by the single compound, of-jarl, fostri minn! too much a 
jarl, my foster-son ! than if he had said, as one would express 
the same thought in English, You are too liberal in bestowing 
rank! You promote Sveinn above his merits ! f In the same 
admirable language, a word of three syllables precisely equivalent 
in its elements, and almost in form, to our words father and bet- 
ter, means a son who has surpassed the merits of his father. The 
Anglo-Saxon inseparable particles wan-, be-, and for- correspond- 
ing to the German v e r - , had great force and beauty, and the 
writer who shall restore them to their primitive use and signifi- 
cance will confer a greater benefit upon our poetical dialect than 
he who shall naturalize a thousand Eomance radicals. % We have 

*Morgendammerungsliandelmaclierreclitsverderbmuliwanderung. 

f Formanna Sogur, VI., 52. 

% It is very difficult to define the meaning of inseparable particles, because 



Lect. ix.] INSEPARABLE PARTICLES. 175 

a few compounds with the prefix for- remaining. For example, 
forbid is compounded of bid and for- used in the sense of opposi- 
tion or contrast, so that bid, which means to command, when 
compounded with for-, signifies to prohibit ; but most of the 
words into which this particle entered are unfortunately obsolete. 
How much better a word is forbled, than faint from bleeding ; 
fordo, than ruin ; fordwined, than dwindled away ; forfoitghten, 
than tired with fighting ; forjudge, than unjustly condemn ; 
forpined, than wasted away ; forwatched, than weary with watch- 
ing ; forwcmdred, than tired with wandering, or in another sense, 
than having lost the way ; forchased, than weary of pursuit ; for- 
wept, than exhausted with weeping ; forworn, than tired or worn 
out ; and so, what a losing bargain we made when we exchanged 
those beautiful words, wanhope, for despair, and wcmtrust, for 
jealousy or suspicion ! 

However stable in its structure English must now be considered, 

their force is usually more or less modified by that of the radical with which 
they are combined, and therefore their significance is best learned by the study 
of examples. Be- is sometimes an intensive of the sense of the verb to which 
it is prefixed, but it more usually and properly serves to express a peculiar re- 
lation between the radical notion conveyed by the verb and the nominative or 
objective of the verb, by which, while the nominative and objective retain 
their syntactical character of subject and object, they are logically placed in a 
different category. Thus, if I sprinkle water, the object on which the drops 
fall is besprinkled ; I bestrew the ground with roses by strewing the flowers upon 
it ; dry earth is powdered to dust, and the garments of a traveller are be-powdered 
with the dust. In very many Anglo-Saxon, as well as modern English verbs, 
the prefix be- has no discoverable force, and in several instances we use be- 
where the primitive word was compounded with the particle g e . Our believe, 
for example, is the Anglo-Saxon g e - 1 y f a n , (the German glauben.) I do 
not know that the history of this change has been traced, but it took place very 
early, for gereden, a participial form, is the only word in Layamon with 
the prefix g e - , and it occurs in the Ormulum only in gehatenn, also a 
participle. The prefix i-, (the Saxon participial and preterite augment g e - , 
possibly distinct from the prefix g e - used with other forms,) is met with in 
the Ormulum in one instance only, but in many cases in Layamon. The com- 
pound form believe does not occur in the Ormulum at all, 1 e f e nn and trow- 
w e n n , the modern trow, being employed instead : but it is often used in 
Layamon in different verbal and nominal forms, as bileaf, bilef, verbs, 
and bilefue, bileue, noun. For- (not to be confounded with fore-, as in 
foretzW) seems to have corresponded nearly to the German ver- in all its 
various uses, and as in the case of be, its peculiar force is too subtle and vari- 
able to be fixed by definition. 



176 COMPOSITION OF WOEDS. [Lect. ix. 

yet the warfare between its elements is not absolutely ended, and 
though peace has been proclaimed, some skirmishing is still going 
on. "We yet forge out questionable derivatives and solder together 
unlawful compounds, in colloquial and especially jocular discourse, 
and bold authors like Carlyle will now and then venture to print 
a heterodox formation. Good writers were less scrupulous two 
hundred years ago, but since Queen Anne's time we are become 
too precise, and as the French &&y precious , to tolerate the words 
in which our progenitors delighted. Fuller concerned himself 
little about starched verbal criticism, helped himself to a good 
word wherever he could find it, and, when need was, manufac- 
tured one for the purpose. Thus, in telling the story of the 
elderly gentleman with two female friends, one of whom, near 
his own age, plucked out his black hairs, the other, more juven- 
ile, his white ones, he says the younger ungrayhcdred him.* This 
however is not worse than our now common triplicate compounds, 
horse-rail-road, steam-tow-boat, and the like.f 

The Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon, though not inferior to the 
German in facility of composition, had nevertheless a smaller 



* The privative un- was formerly much more freely used than at present. 

In the Wycliffite versions, Prol. to Romans, 299, we find : ' ' The Jewis 
* * * hi hreking of the lawe have vnworshipid God"; and Rom. i. 13, " I nyle 
you for to vnknoice. " 

Heywood has unput, and Fuller in his sermon, Comfort in Calamity, says, 
" God permitteth the foundations to be destroyed, because he knows he can 
wft-destroy them, I mean rebuild them." Sylvester, the translator of the 
"Divine" Du Bartas, the delight of Shakespeare's contemporaries, uses to un- 
olde for to rejuvenate ; 

Minde-gladding fruit that can un-olde a man. 

Du Bartas, edition of 1611, p. 608. 

Unpreached occurs in Keiling's Reports, and Lord Clarendon somewhere 
has "untaken notice of." 

f Clumsy as are some of these compounds, the French are sometimes driven 
to employ combinations even more unwieldy. Chinese-sugar-cane may be en- 
dured, but canne-a-sucre-de-la-Chine can only be paralleled by our 
mongrel pocket-hand-Jcer-chief. In fact Du Bartas's French goes nearly, if not 
quite, as far in uncouth combination as does Sylvester's English. 

Sylvester is also remarkable for the boldness of his agglutinations. In his 
series of sonnets, "The Miracle of Peace," we find "the In-one-Christ-bap- 
tized," "the selfe-weale-wounding Lance," "th' yerst-most-prince-loyal peo- 
ple," and others not less extraordinary. 



Lect. ix.] COMPOSITION OF WORDS. 177 

number of distinctive and derivative forms, and they were tlms 
driven to nse composition in some cases, where the Teuton ex- 
pressed a similar notion by a difference of ending. Of these com- 
binations, there is one common to the Scandinavian and the Eng- 
lish, which, in awkwardness, surpasses almost any thing to be 
met with in any other speech. I refer to that by which the dis- 
tinction of sex is expressed, not by a termination or an independ- 
ent adjective, but by using the personal pronoun as a prefix, as 
for example in the words lie-tear and she-hear^ he-goat and she- 
goat. * 

The effort which German scholars have long been making to 
substitute native for foreign derivatives and compounds, has occa- 
sioned the fabrication of many extremely clumsy words, and the 
newly awakened zeal for the study of Anglo-Saxon and Old- 
English will probably lead to somewhat similar results in our 
tongue. The principles of composition may then be considered 
to have a prospective, if not an immediate, practical bearing on 
English etymology, and I will illustrate some of them by exam- 
ples drawn from the German, which exhibit their actual applica- 
tion in more tangible and intelligible shapes than the present 
scientific dialect of English offers. The ancients had little 
occasion for scientific nomenclature, and they had no source from 
which to borrow the few terms required, except their own radi- 
cals. Aristotle could not do otherwise. The Germans do from 
mistaken choice what he did from necessity. Take, for instance, 
the idea of fluidity. The Anglo-Saxon and the Old-German had 
no substantive to express this notion, the condition of being fluid, 
but they used the specific words water, oil, and the like, instead 

* In Greek and Latin lexicons and grammars, the article 6, 77, to, and the 
demonstrative, hie, haec, hoc, are sometimes employed to indicate the 
gender of nouns, as occupying less space than the usual abbreviations, masc. , 
fern., and neut. Gil, Logon. Ang. p. 3, writing in Latin, uses hie according 
to the English idiom : " Bucke, hie dama." 

Not less awkward than these compounds is the employment of the personal 
pronoun as a noun for male and female, as in Dampier, 1793, I., 106 : * * 
" both Re's and She's [the turtles] come ashoar in the day-time and lie in the 
sun." Grimm's Dictionary under Er, 11, gives very similar examples of the 
employment of e r and s i e in German, and this is hardly worse than the com- 
mon German use of the neuter diminutives, Mannchen and Weibchen, 
mauling and wifelvag, to designate, respectively, the male and the female of 
animals. 

8* 



178 COMPOSITION OF WORDS. [Lect. ix. 

of framing a generic term to express them all. Science has 
taught that, besides the gross, heavy, visible, incompressible muds, 
water and oil, there are other more ethereal substances, possess- 
ing the quality of fluidity, that is of flowing and spreading indefi- 
nitely when only partially confined, and which are, besides, light 
and highly compressible, elastic, and, usually, invisible and appar- 
ently inadhesive. Of such fluids, common air, and the more re- 
cently detected gases, are familiar examples. Before the essential 
character of the gases was understood, English had borrowed the 
word fluidity from the Latin, to denote the most obvious and 
striking characteristic of water, oil, and other like bodies, and the 
Germans had formed from the native verb fliessen, to flow, a 
corresponding substantive, Flussigkeit, which is applied both 
to the property of fluidity and to bodies which possess it. The 
knowledge of the character of gaseous fluids rendered it desira- 
ble to contrive some means of grouping under separate denomi- 
nations the two classes, namely, the incompressible, unelastic, visi- 
ble, and the compressible, elastic, and invisible fluids. In English, 
we have not yet distinguished them, except by adding the epi- 
thets elastic, gaseous, compressible, or inelastic, incompressible; 
but in Germany compound adjectives have been framed, which, 
clothed in an English form, would answer to elastic-fluid sub- 
stances and drojpjpdble-fluid substances, or, those which left free 
expand themselves like air, and those which can be dropped or 
poured out, like water. In English we confine the appellation 
liquid to these latter, but we apply fluid indiscriminately to both. 
Thus we call oil and water liquids, but we cannot speak of air 
and the simple gases as liquids, though in poetry the phrase liquid 
ether and the like are used ; but on the other hand, we apply the 
substantive and adjective fluid to air, water, and oil alike. Doubt- 
less the period is not far distant when the elastic and the inelastic 
fluids will be distinguished by appropriate designations in English, 
though it may be hoped less cumbrous ones than the German, 
and we shall also probably have specific generalizations for the 
watery and the oleaginous fluids. 

However desirable it may be to recover the ancient plasticity 
of the Anglo-Saxon speech, and to restore to circulation many of 
its obsolete most expressive words, yet the prevalence, among 
English scholars, of a purism as exclusive as that of Germany, 



Lect. ix.] SCIENTIFIC COMPOUNDS. 179 

would be a serious injury to the language, as indeed I think it is 
in German itself, though of course a far less evil in a harmonious 
and unmixed speech like the German, than in one fundamentally 
composite, and to use a legal term, repugnant, hke ours. German 
is singularly homogeneous and consistent in its vocabulary and its 
structure, and the desire to strengthen and maintain its oneness 
of character is extremely natural with those to whom it is ver- 
nacular. The essential unity of its speech gives its study immense 
value as both a philological and an intellectual discipline, and it 
has powerfully contributed to the eminently national and original 
character of a literature, which, for a century, has done more to 
widen the sphere of human knowledge, and elevate the habitual 
range of human thought, than the learning and the intellect of 
all the world besides. I think, nevertheless, that it has purchased 
its present linguistic purity at some cost of clearness and precision 
of expression, perhaps even at some loss of distinctness of thought. 

Although it must be admitted, that facility of word-coinage is 
in many respects a great linguistic convenience, it is quite another 
question whether, in philosophical exactness of meaning, any 
thing is gained by using words derived from or compounded of 
roots so familiar that they continually force upon us their often 
trivial etymology, and thus withdraw our attention from the fig- 
urative or abstract meaning which we seek to impose upon them. 

We express most moral affections, most intellectual functions 
and attributes, most critical categories and most scientific notions, 
by words derived from Greek and Latin primitives. Such words 
do not carry their own definition with them, and to the mere 
English student they are purely arbitrary in their signification.* 
The scientific writer who introduces or employs them, may so 
define his terms as to attach to them the precise idea he wishes 
to convey, and the reader or hearer receives the word unaccom- 
panied by any incongruous image suggested by its root-form. 
"Where, on the contrary, words applied to so noble uses are de- 
rived from common and often vulgar roots, from the vocabulary 
of the market, the kitchen, or the stable, the thoughts of the read- 
er must be frequently disturbed by gross or undignified images, 
called forth by an etymology drawn from the names of f amiliar 

* See Lecture iv. 



180 LATITUDE ATtt) LONGITUDE. [Lect. ix. 

and humble objects and processes. Take, for instance, the geo- 
graphical meaning of the Latin-English words, longitude and 
latitude. The ancients supposed the torrid and the frigid zones 
to be uninhabitable and even impenetrable by man, but while the 
earth, as known to them, was bounded westwardly by the At- 
lantic Ocean, it extended indefinitely towards the east. The di- 
mensions of the habitable world, then, (and ancient geography em- 
braced only the home of man, rf oixov/iev??,) were much greater, 
measured from west to east, than from south to north. Accord- 
ingly, early geographers called the greater dimension, or the east 
and west line, the length, longitudo, of the earth ; the 
shorter dimension, or the north and south line, they denominated 
its breadth, latitudo. These Latin terms are retained in the 
modern geography of most European nations, but with a modified 
meaning. The north or south distance of any point on the earth's 
surface from the equator is the north or south latitude of that 
point. The east or west distance between two lines drawn per- 
pendicularly to the equator, through two joints on the earth's 
surface, is the east or west longitude of those points from each 
other. Latitude and longitude etymologically indeed mean 
"breadth and length, yet in their use in English, their form does 
not suggest to the student their primary radical signification, and 
he attaches to them no meaning whatever but their true scientific 
import. The employment of the English terms "breadth and 
length, to denote respectively north and south and east and west 
distance on the surface of a sphere, would, in the present ad- 
vanced state of our knowledge, be a perversion of the true mean- 
ing of words. Yet this is exactly what German purism does 
when it rejects the precise, philosophic longitude and latitude, 
substitutes for them the vague and inaccurate terms Lange 
and Breite, length and breadth, and says, accordingly, that 
St. Petersburg lies in sixty degrees of north breadth, and twenty- 
eight of east length from Paris. Still more palpable is this abuse 
of speech when a different form of expression is employed, and 
we are told that the breadth of the city of New York is 41°, its 
length 74° W * 

* I do not know whether the Germans or the Dutch were the first to trans- 
late longitude and latitude by native words of their respective tongues. The 
earliest examples I have noted of the use of modern equivalents of these words 



Lect. ix.] GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 181 

The constant obtrusion of trivial, and often misleading, ety- 
mologies in the scientific dialect of Germany, produces in the 
mind a confusion between words logically or etymologically re- 
lated, which obscures the meaning of scientific passages. This 
probably explains how Budorff came to say in his Schriften der 
Rbmischen Feldemesser : Wahrend wir [moderns] die Entfer- 
nung vom JKquator nach Norden oder Siiden, Zange, die Ent- 
fernung vom Meridian nach Osten oder Westen r Breite, zu nen- 
nen genswohnt sind. 

In like manner, the English adjective great and the German 
gross are both, in their proper signification, applicable only to 
objects which, as tested by the ordinary standards of comparison, 
are large, and their nouns, greatness in the one language, G r 6 s s e 
in the other, are strictly conjugate in meaning. In the philo- 
sophic dialect of English and the Romance languages, we employ 
magnitude as the scientific equivalent of size, dimensions. Mag- 
nitude is derived from the Latin magnus, great, but that ety- 
mology is not so familiar to English ears as to attach to the word 
magnitude the idea of relatively large bulk, and we apply the 
term, without a sense of incongruity, to the dimensions of any 
object however small. The Germans use G r 6 s s e as the scien- 
tific equivalent of magnitude, and in this they pervert ' language 
in the same way we should do, in speaking of the greatness of 
microscopic animalculse so small that a hundred of them could lie 
on the point of a pin. 

So in chemistry and in the language of industrial art, to calcine 
signifies to reduce, by longer or shorter exposure to heat, metals 
and other bodies popularly considered incombustible, to a friable 
condition. The burning of Kme is a familiar instance of calcina- 
tion, and in fact calcine is derived from calx, the Latin word 
for lime. Burnt limestone, and the substances to which metals 
and many other bodies are reduced by heat, having a certain re- 
semblance to each other in consistence and other properties, were 
conceived to be chemically related, and therefore the name of 
calx was applied to these substances in the dialect of the alchem- 

are in Dapper, Beschrijving van Persie, 1672. De stadt Derbend is gelegen 
op de 1 e n g t e van vijf en tachtig graden, en op de noorder b r e e t e van 
een en veertigk graden, dertigh minuten. — p. 20. Grimm's Dictionary gives 
no examples of such. use. 



182 GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. [Lect. ix. 

ists, and passed from their laboratories into the language of com- 
mon life. The English verb calcine, to us, to whom the etymol- 
ogy of the word is not always present, expresses precisely the re- 
duction of incombustible substances to the state of a calx. The 
modern German uses, instead of the alchemical calciniren, 
the verb verkalken derived from K a 1 k , lime, which is no 
doubt allied to the Latin calx, and probably enough derived 
from it. But K a 1 k has not the signification of calx, and the 
verb verkalken, therefore, properly means to reduce to lime, 
not to bring to the condition of a calx, which latter acceptation 
the scientific purists have arbitrarily, and in violation of the prin- 
ciples of their own language, imposed upon it. 

We have some, but happily not many, similar examples in the 
received scientific dialect of English. Our substantive acid, for 
instance, is Latin, but for want of a native term, we employ it as 
a conjugate noun to the adjective sour, and it has become almost 
as familiar a word as sour itself. Chemistry adopted acid as the 
technical name of a class of bodies, of which those first recognized 
in science were distinguished by sourness of taste. But as chem- 
ical knowledge advanced, it was discovered that there were com- 
pounds precisely analogous in essential character, which were not 
sour, and consequently acidity was but an accidental quality of 
some of these bodies, not a necessary or universal characteristic of 
all. It was thought too late to change the name, and accordingly in 
all the European languages the term acid, or its etymological 
equivalent, is now applied to rock-crystal, quartz, and flint. In 
like manner, from a similar misapplication of salt, in scientific 
use, chemists class the substance of which junk-bottles, French 
mirrors, windows and opera-glasses are made, among the salts, 
while, on the other hand, analysts have declared that the essential 
character, not only of other so-called salts, but of common kitch- 
en-salt, the salt of salts, had been mistaken, that salt is not a 
salt, and accordingly have excluded that substance from the class 
of bodies upon which, as their truest representative, it had be- 
stowed its name.* When a plant or animal is named specifically 

* Es ist heutzutage nicht mehr moglich eine Definizion einer " Saure" oder 
eines " Salzes" zu geben, welche alle Korper, die man als Sauren oder Snlze 
bezeichnet, in sicli einschliesst. Wir haben Sauren welche geschrnacklos sind, 
welche die Pflanzenf arben niclit rotken, welche die Alkalien nicht neutralisiren ; 






Lect. ix.] GEEMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMESTCLATtJEE. 183 

maximus, it often turns out there is a larger. The attempt to 
press into the service of the exact sciences words taken from the 
vocabulary of common life is thus seen to be objectionable, be- 
cause such words are incapable of scientific precision and single, 
ness of meaning, and, moreover, as in the instances cited, they often 
express entirely false notions of physical fact.* Language, if not 
imitative, was at least descriptive in its earlier stages. The at- 
tempt to make the dialect of science descriptive now, is to carry 
language back to its infancy. Though philologists trace the 
Arabic, or rather Indian, numerals, in their written forms, to the 
initial letters of the Sanscrit words which express them, some 
mathematicians still maintain that they were originally strictly 
pictorial. We might now as well try to restore these signs to 
their primitive composite structure, and insist that the character 
for every numeral should be made up of as many strokes as it ex- 
presses units, or that twenty should be written two-ten, as to at- 
tempt to force descriptive terms upon science. 

"With respect to compounds of trivial roots, it must be ad- 
mitted that they are advantageously employed as the names of 
familiar material or immaterial objects and processes, of a some- 
what complex but not abstruse nature. Thus weathered is a 
good word because truly expressive, though it does not convey 
a strictly scientific idea. Steam-boat is a better word than the 
Greco-French pyroscaphe, horse-shoe arch better than Sara- 
cenic arch, the German Vorgefuhl than presentiment. So 
English physicians would have done more wisely in adopting the 
plain descriptive compounds, day-blindness and night-blindness, 
which, as appellations of certain affections of the sight, explain 
themselves, than to borrow the Greek nyctalopia, f which 

es gibt Sauren, in denen Sauerstoff ein Bestandtheil ist und in denen der Was- 
serstoff fehlt, in anderen ist Wasserstoff, kein Sauerstoff. Der Begriff von Salz 
ist zuletzt so verkehrt geworden, dass man dahinkam das Kochsalz, das Salz 
aller Salze, von dem die andern den Namen haben, aus der Keihe der eigentli- 
chen Salze auszuschliessen. Liebig, Chemische Brief e, Vierte Auflage, I., 96. 

* Decompound may be cited as an instance of a word which, in its scientific 
use, conveys an entirely false idea. Decompound is defined by Webster as, to 
compound substances already compounded, to compound a second time, whereas 
etymologically it should be the equivalent of decompose. 

f HvKTofaiit la est passio qua per diem visus paten tibus oculis denegatur, et 
nocturnis irruentibus tenebris redditur, aut versa vice (ut plerique volunt) die 
redditur, nocte negatur. Isidoetjs, Orig., IV. c. viii. 



184 GEKMA1ST SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATUKE. [Lect. ix. 

has been applied by some writers to one of these maladies, by 
others to its converse, and which, as we learn from Isidore, the 
grandson of the great King Theodoric, was just as equivocal twelve 
hundred and fifty years ago as it is to-day. 

But in the use of these words in the dialect of science, in their 
application to abstract or obscure philosophical conceptions, the 
inappropriateness of a nomenclature derived from familiar roots 
is often very obvious. Our English word anatomy, which, refer- 
red to its Greek original, means simply cutting up, has come to 
have the signification of carefully dissecting, separating, or laying 
open by the knife, the framework, tissues, and vessels of animal 
bodies with a view of studying the structure and functions of 
their organs; and all this is fairly implied and felt by every 
speaker or hearer whenever the word is uttered, nor does it sug- 
gest to the mind any other possible signification, or call up any 
alien image. Many German writers have chosen to repudiate 
this so expressive, definite, and strictly philosophic word, and to 
substitute for it the compound Zergliederungskunst, 
which, dressed in an English form, would be equivalent to the 
Art-of-dismembermg, or more exactly, the Unlimbing art. Now 
this unwieldy compound rather expresses the act of dissecting, 
the mechanical part of anatomy and some therefore have thought 
it necessary to employ another word, Zergliederungswis- 
senschaft, the knowledge or science of unlimbing, to indicate 
the scientific purpose and character of anatomy, which is so hap- 
pily implied in what to us is a purely arbitrary word. 

Whenever a derivative or compound term may, without vio- 
lence, have several meanings, it is a matter of considerable diffi- 
culty for those to whom all these meanings are, so to speak, in- 
stinctively familiar, to confine their intellectual conceptions strictly 
to one, but, to the English student, anatomy is practically not a 
compound. He does not refer it to its etymological source, and 
to him it can mean nothing but scientific dissection ; nor can the 
word suggest any image not appropriately belonging to that idea. 

In the nomenclature of Chemistry, to designate the bodies 
which, because analysis is not yet carried beyond them, are pro- 
visionally denominated simple substances, we employ Greek com- 
pounds, giving to them, by formal definition, and therefore arbi- 
trarily, a precise, distinct, rigorously scientific meaning, exclud- 



Lect. ix.] GEKMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 185 

ing all other direct or collateral, proper or figurative significations.* 
In the German chemical nomenclature, these bodies are desig- 
nated by Teutonic compounds derived from roots as trivial as any 
in the language. The words carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, 
employed in English, do not recall their etymology, and their 
meaning is gathered only from technical definition. They ex- 
press the entire scientific notion of the objects they stand for, and 
are abridged definitions, or rather signs of definition, of those 
objects. They are to the English student as purely intellectual 
symbols as the signs of addition, subtraction, and equality in 
Algebra, or, to use a more appropriate simile, as their initials C 
for carbon, H for hydrogen, O for oxygen, and the like, which in 
conjunction with numerals are used in expressing quantitative 
proportions in primary combinations. The corresponding German 
compounds, Kohl-Stoff, "Wasser-Stof f , Sauer-Stoff, 
and Stick-Stoff, coal-stuff, water-stuff, sour-stuff, and choke- 
stuff, express, each, only a single one of the characteristics of the 
body to which they are applied, to say nothing of the unphilo- 
sophical tendency of thus grossly materializing and vulgarizing 
our conception of agencies so subtile and so ethereal in their 
nature, f 

* Unfortunately the English chemical nomenclature seems to be becoming 
gradually more cumbrous and less definite. In a recent number of Nature, I 
find such words as ortlionitrotoluol and paranitrotoluol, ozohydrobenzoin and 
nietacetytololuol. Paraffine is derived from the Latin parum affinis, little like, 
because paraffine is slightly like something else. On the other hand isopire is 
derived from the Greek icog and nvp because the blow-pipe affects it as it does 
many other minerals. In short, the new chemical nomenclature, though it may 
have some advantages as a help to memory, is often inherently as absurd as 
the jargon of the old alchemists. 

f In the Danish chemical nomenclature brint from at bramda, to bum, signi- 
fies hydrogen; ilt from ild, fire, signifies oxygen. Brint and ilt therefore, 
though not allied words, express allied ideas, both involving the notion of com- 
bustion, and they are therefore liable to be confounded in the memory of the 
learner. 

The puristico-descriptive nomenclature seems to have reached its acme in 
Volger's vocabulary of Crystallography (Krystallographie, Stuttgart, 1854). 
In another of his works, this author describes a form of Boracite, a solid of 
sixty-two sides, as the linkstimplig-hockertimplige, wiirflig- 
kugeltimplige, rechts-timplige Knochling, and another va- 
riety of the same crystal as the linkstimplig-hockertimplig- 
knochlige, rechtskugeltimplige, wiirflige (rechte) Tim- 



186 GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. [Lect. ix. 

The use of the new German technical terms is subject to this 
further inconvenience, that the compound will not admit the 
adjectival form, and of course the noun is without a conjugate 
attributive. While, therefore, a German may say, in pure Teu- 
tonic, for anatomy, the Art-of -dismembering ; for astronomy, 
Star-knowledge; for geography, Earth-knowledge and Earth- 
description (either of which, by the way, may as properly apply to 
soil or rock as to the globe), yet when he has occasion for a cor- 
responding adjective, he must resort to the Greek compounds 
anatomisch, astronomisch, geographisch, and 
thus he introduces confusion into his scientific dialect, and loses 
whatever had been gained by the introduction of native com- 
pound nouns. So, in expressing the quantitative proportions de- 
pi i n g , the meaning of which would not be altogether obvious even to his 
countrymen, had he not informed us that in the Niederdeutsche Mundart, 
Tim pel signifies Zipfel, or scharfe Ecke. Yolger, Monographie 
des Borazites, p. 120. 

Kenngott (Synonymik der Krystallographie XXXV.) gives us this example 
of the application of Yolger's nomenclature to a still more complicated form 
of crystallization : "Einplattliger, querstutzlig-stutzliger, 
querkochdachliger, quermitteldachliger, querhochthurm- 
liger, quer m i t tel t hii r ml i ger, quer n ie der t hii r m liger, 
schlankzinkliger, niederzinkliger, quaderligzweif ach- 
querkantliger Idokras-Querling," and even this string of hard 
words leaves the form of the mineral but half described. In justice to our 
author, it ought to be observed that, long as his technical words are, they are 
much shorter than some of those employed by others. Thus Schiiblingj 
shoveling, is a trifle compared to pentagontriahistetetraeder, and Keiling, 
wedgeling, has the like advantage over quadratic-spenoidin-normal-position. 

Besides these, Yolger uses Schragling, slantling, Thiirmling, 
towerling, Dachling, roofling, E c k 1 i n g , cornerling, and many more of 
like coinage, by all which 

More is meant than meets the ear. 

It is to be regretted that our author does not consistently adhere to the princi- 
ples of a system which he has taken such pains to elaborate, and it is not easy 
to see why he should speak of Halurgen and die halurgische 
Geologie, when he had so good etymological material as Salz to work 
upon. 

The philosophers of Holland have exhibited a greater degree of etymologi- 
cal courage than their German brethren. They have framed conjugate 
adjectives for their newly formed scientific compound nouns, and thus built 
up such words as ontleedkundig for anatomical, de proefonder- 
vindelijke wetenschappen for the experimental sciences, in which 



Lect. IX.] EQUIVOCAL WOEDS. 187 

ter mined by ultimate analysis in chemistry, he uses H and O, the 
initials of hydrogen and oxygen, to represent those bodies, and 
the student of chemistry is taught that H stands for Wasser- 
s t o f f , O for Sauerstoff, and so of the rest. 

It is no answer to the objections I am urging to say that habit 
reconciles us to the scientific use of unscientific terms ; that they 
at length, when employed in combination with other words of 
art, sink their etymology, so to speak, and cease to suggest dis- 
turbing images ; for just in the same proportion as they do this 
they cease to be descriptive at all, and the only argument left for 
their use is that of a form more in harmony with the ordinary 
orthoepical combinations of the language, aa argument certainly 
not to be weighed against the obvious disadvantages of a vocabu- 
lary, which is not only trivial, but which scientific discovery is 
constantly showing to have been founded on false analogies, and 
erroneous theory. 45 ' 

There is, it must be admitted, a convenience in the double 
forms of some part of the German neologistic nomenclature, as 
for example in the distinction between Erdkunde, the knowl- 
edge of the earth, and Erdbeschreibung, the description 
of the earth. These ideas are indeed logically distinguishable, 

last heptasyllable, indeed, the radical word p r o e f is probably not indige- 
nous, but boiTowed from the Latin through the French. 

Staning, Voormals en Thans, 44, has "scheikundige of werktuigs- 
kundige," chemical or mechanical; and on p. 78, " volkshuishoud- 
kundig, beschowd," considered from-the-point-of -national-economy ; 
volkshuishoudkundig being used adverbially. The former two of 
these compounds are absurd and unmeaning, because, as used in the passage 
where they occur, they refer to chemical or mechanical action, and therefore 
the element k u n d e is worse than superfluous. 

So on p. 82, he uses evennachtslyn for equator, and on p. 87, 
gekorvene for insects. In the Dutch mathematical vocabulary we have 
teerlingsicortel for cube-root. But terms so formed are by no means confined to 
Dutch writers on physical and mathematical science, for the grammarians 
use zelfklinker and medeklinker for vowel and consonant, and 
gezichteinder, sight-ender , is employed for horizon by Van Lennep and 
other belles-lettres authors. 

*Boltz, Fremdwort, p. 33, proposes to call cigar, Glimmerstengel; 
electricity, Blitzstoff; nature, Zeugemutter; gallop (of a horse) 
Schnellhiipgelauf; person, Vernunftwesen. Strahler has been 
suggested for Kry stall, not because it shines, but because it was popularly be- 
lieved to be produced by lightning. 



188 EQUIVOCAL WOEDS. [Lect. ix. 

because, we may know that which we do not undertake to de- 
scribe, and we may undertake to describe that which we know, 
or, as experience unhappily too often shows, that which we do 
not know ; but it is by no means clear that there is any advan- 
tage in having a separate word for the expression of every dis- 
tinguishable shade of human thought. True it is, as is observed 
by Coleridge, that " by familiarizing the mind to equivocal ex- 
pressions, that is, such as may be taken in two or more different 
meanings, we introduce confusion of thought, and furnish the 
sophist with his best and handiest tools. For the juggle of sophis- 
try consists, for the greater part, in using a word in one sense in 
the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion." But it is 
equally true, as the same great master elsewhere remarks, that 
"It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to dis- 
tinguish." The ramifications and subdivisions of our vocabulary 
must end somewhere. The permutations and combinations of 
articulate sounds are not infinite, nor can the human memory re- 
tain an unlimited number of words. It is inevitable that in some 
cases one word must serve to express different ideas, and if they 
are ideas from the occasional confusion of which no danger to any- 
great moral or intellectual principle is to be feared, we must be 
content to trust to the intelligence of our hearers to distinguish 
for themselves. There is much intellectual discipline in the mere 
use of language. The easiest disciplines are not necessarily the 
best, and therefore a vocabulary so complete as never to exercise 
the sagacity of a reader, by obliging him to choose between two 
meanings either of which is possible, would afford very little 
training to faculties, of whose culture speech is of itself the most 
powerful instrument.* 

* Few will deny that the French chemical nomenclature of Lavoisier's time, 
which spread so rapidly over Europe, was a highly beneficial improvement in 
the vocabulary of the branch of knowledge to which it was applied, but it 
operated in some respects both injuriously to that science and unjustly to the 
fame of the philosophers whose discoveries had made chemistry what it was. 
It produced a complete severance between the old and the new, a hiatus in the 
history, and an apparent revolution in the character, of the science, which has 
led recent times to suppose that futile alchemy ended, and philosophical chem- 
istry began, with the adoption of the new nomenclature. The reader will find 
some interesting observations on this point in Liebig's Chemische Briefe, 4te 
Aufiage, Brief III. 






LECT LTEE X. 

THE VOCABULAKY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

in. 

The aphorism, popularly, but perhaps erroneously, ascribed to 
Buffon, " The style is the man," is a limited application of the 
general theory, that there is such a, relation between the mind of 
man and the speech he uses, that a perfect knowledge of either 
would enable an acute psychological philologist to deduce and 
construct the other from it. The distinctive characteristics of 
nations or races employing different tongues, so far as we are able 
to account for them, are due to causes external to the individual 
though common in their operation to the whole people, such as 
climate, natural productions, modes of life dependent on soil and 
climate, or, in short, to physical conditions. 

We might then admit this theory, without qualification, if it 
were once established that the language of a people is altogether 
a natural product of their physical constitution and circumstances, 
and that its character depends upon laws as material as those 
which determine the hue and growth of the hair, the 'color of the 
eyes and skin, the musical quality of the human voice, or the in- 
articulate cries of the lower animals. But those who believe that 
there is in man a life above organization, a spirit above nature, 
will be slow to allow that his only instrument for the outward 
manifestation of his mightiest intellectual energies and loftiest 
moral aspirations, as well as his sole means of systematic culture 
for the intellect and heart, can be the product of a mode of 
physical being, % which, though in some points superior in degree, 
is yet identical in kind, with that shared also by the lowest of the 
brutes that acknowledge him as their lord and master. Nor is 
the theory in question at all consistent with observed facts ; for 
while nations, not distinguished by any marked differences of 

(189) 



190 LANGUAGE AND CHAEACTEE. [Lect. x. 

physical structure or external condition, use languages character- 
ized by wide diversities of vocabulary and syntax, individuals in 
the same nation, the same household even, display striking dis- 
similarities of person, of intellect, and of temper, and yet, in spite 
of perceptible variations in articulation, and in the choice and 
collocation of words, speak in the main not only one language, 
but one dialect. History presents numerous instances of a com- 
plete revolution in national character, without any radical change 
in the language of the people, and, contrariwise, of persistence of 
character with a great change in tongue. The forms of speech 
which the slavish, and therefore deservedly enslaved, Koman of 
the first century of our era employed in addressing Tiberius, were 
as simple and direct as would have been those of a soldier in con- 
versing with his centurion in the heroic age of Regulus. The 
Icelander of the twelfth century carried the law of blood for 
blood as far as the Corsican or the Kabyle of the nineteenth, and 
when his honor was piqued, or his passions roused, he was as 
sanguinary in his temper as the Spaniard, the Anizeh-Arab, or 
the Ashantee. His descendants, speaking very nearly the same 
dialect, are so much softened in character, that violence is almost 
unknown among them, and when, a few years since, a native was 
condemned to death, not one of his countrymen could be induced 
to act as the minister of avenging justice. On the other hand, it 
would be difficult to make out any difference of character, habits, 
or even ethical system, between the Bedouin of the present day 
and his ancestors in the time of Abraham and of Job, and yet his 
language has unquestionably undergone many great changes.* 

The relations between man and his speech are not capable of 
precise formulation, and we cannot perhaps make any nearer ap- 
proach to exact truth than to say, that while every people has its 
general analogies, every individual has his peculiar idiosyncrasies, 

* As an illustration of such persistence in the East, may be mentioned an 
anecdote related by an English gentleman who held for a time a high official 
position in India. Complaints were brought to him of the brutal treatment of 
a Hindoo soldier by his colonel, who, among other acts of personal violence 
towards the poor native, had, on one occasion, knocked out his front teeth. 
The colonel was heavily fined and the money paid over to the injured Hindoo, 
who, however, seemed not a little disappointed at the decision. His judge 
then asked him why he was not satisfied. The soldier replied, " Because I 
thought you would have ordered my colonel's teeth to be knocked out." 






Lect. x.] LANGUAGE AND CHARACTER. 191 

physical, mental, and linguistic, and that mind and speech, na- 
tional and individual, modify and are modified by each other, to 
an extent, and by the operation of laws, which we are not yet 
able to define and generalize, though, in particular instances, the 
relation of cause and effect can be confidently affirmed to exist. 

But in the midst of this uncertainty, we still recognize the 
working of the great principle of diversity in unity which charac- 
terizes all the operations of the creative mind ; and though every 
man has a dialect of his own, as he has his own special features 
of character, his distinct peculiarities of shape, gait, tone, and 
gesture, in short, the individualities which make him John and 
not Peter, * yet over and above all these, he shares in the general 
traits which together make up the unity of his language, the unity 
of his nation. "Unity of speech," says a Danish writer, "is a 
necessary condition of the independent development of a people, 
and the coexistence of two languages in a political state is one of 
the greatest national misfortunes. Every race has its own organic 
growth, which impresses its own peculiar form on the religious 
ideas and the philosophical opinions of the people, on their politi- 
cal constitution, their legislation, their customs, and the expression 
of all these individualities is found in their speech. In this are 
embalmed that to which they have aspired, that to which they 
have attained. There we find the record of their thought, its 
comprehension, wealth and depth, the life of the people, the 
limits of their culture, their appetencies and their antipathies, 
whatsoever has germinated, fructified, ripened, and passed away 
among them, yes, even their short-comings and their trespasses. 
The people and their language are so con-natural, that the one 
thrives, changes, perishes with the other." So far our author, 
and with the allowances to be made for the exaggeration into 

* Bishop Home, remarking on this principle, says : "The wisdom of this 
arrangement of Divine Providence in the Countenance, Voice, and Handwrit- 
ing which, although the same features go to the formation of the countenance, 
the same muscular movements to the articulation of the voice, and the tracings 
of the pen, yet so infinitely diversified are they that man is at once distinguished 
from his fellow, by his face in the light, his voice in the dark, and his hand- 
writing when absent." 

Detective Police has lately observed that an inked impression from the ball 
of the thumb is never precisely similar in any two individuals, and hence such 
impressions are useful as tests of personal identity. 



192 LANGUAGE AND CHAEACTEE. [Lect. x. 

which writers are often led by their enthusiasm for their subject, 
his views are entitled to general concurrence. "We think by 
words, and therefore thought and words cannot but act and react 
on each other. As a man speaks, so he thinks, and as a man 
thinketh in his heart, so is he. 

It is evident, therefore, that unity of speech is essential to the 
unity of a people. Community of language is a stronger bond 
than identity of religion or of government, and contemporaneous 
nations of one speech, however formally separated by differences 
of creed or of political organization, are essentially one in culture, 
one in tendency, one in influence. The fine patriotic effusion of 
Arndt, " Was ist des Deutschen Yaterland," was founded upon 
the idea that the oneness of the Deutsche Zunge, the German 
speech, implied a oneness of spirit, of interest, of aims and of 
duties, and the universal acceptance with which the song was re- 
ceived was evidence that the poet had struck a chord to which 
every Teutonic heart responded. The national language is the 
key to the national intellect, the national heart, and it is the 
special vocation of what is technically called philology, as distin- 
guished from linguistics, to avail itself of the study of language 
as a means of knowing, not man in the abstract, but man as col- 
lected into distinct communities, informed with the same spirit, 
exposed to the same moulding influences, and pursuing the same 
great objects by substantially the same means. We are certainly 
not authorized to conclude that all the individuals of a nation are 
altogether alike because they speak the same mother-tongue, but 
their characters, mental and physical, presumably resemble each 
other as nearly as the fragments of the common language which 
each has appropriated to his own use.* Every individual selects 
from the general stock his own vocabulary, his favorite combina- 
tions of words, his own forms of syntax, and thus frames for himself 
a dialect, the outward expression of which is an index to the inner 
life of the man. No two Englishmen, Germans, or Frenchmen 
speak and act in all points alike, yet in character as well as in 
speech, they would generally be found to have more points of 

* Galton's curious experiments show that a representation of the general 
type of a particular Mbe or family may be obtained by superposing upon each 
other faint photographic impressions of the features of several individuals 
thus related. 






Lect. x.] LANGUAGE AND CHARACTER. 193 

sympathy and resemblance with each other, than either of them 
with any man of a different tongne. 

The relations between the grammatical structure or general 
idiom of a language and the moral and intellectual character of 
those who speak it, are usually much more uncertain and obscure 
than the connection between the particular words which compose 
their stock, and the thoughts, habits, and tendencies of those who 
employ them. Except under circumstances where our mouths 
are sealed and our thoughts suppressed from motives of prudence, 
of delicacy, or of shame, the names of the objects dearest to the 
heart, the expression of the passions which most absorb us, the no- 
menclature of the religious, social, or political creeds or parties to 
which we have attached ourselves, will most frequently rise to 
the lips. Hence it is the vocabulary and the phraseological com- 
binations of the man, or class of men, which must serve as the 
clue to guide us into the secret recesses of their being ; and in 
spite of occasional exceptions, apparent or real, it is generally 
true that our choice of words, as also of the special or conven- 
tional meanings of words, is determined by the character, the 
ruling passion, the habitual thoughts, — by the life, in short, of 
the man ; and in this sense Ben Jonson uttered a great and im- 
portant trutn when he said : " Language most shows a man : 
speak that I may see thee ! * It springs out of the most retired 
and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the 
mind. No glass renders a man's form and likeness so true as his 
speech." 

But there is much risk of error in the too extended application 
of this criterion. In two cases only can we be justified in condemn- 
ing a people upon the strength of indications furnished by their 
language alone. The one is that of the voluntary, or at least the 
free, selection of a debased or perverted diction, when a higher 
and purer one is possible ; the other, that of the non-existence of 
words expressive of great ideas, and this will generally be found 
coupled with an abundance of terms denoting, and yet not stig- 
matizing, gross and wicked acts and passions. 

There are cases where the crimes of rulers are mirrored in the 

* Parla perchS io ti veggia, diceva il Bernia. 

Florio, Giardino de Recreatione, p. 181. 1591. 

9 



194: LANGUAGE OF ITALY. [Lect. x. 

speech of their subjects ; * others, where governments, by a long 
course of corruption, oppression, and tyranny, have stamped upon 
the language of their people, or at least upon its temporary con- 
ventionalities, a tone of hypocrisy, falsehood, baseness, that clings 
to the tongue, even after the spirit of the nation is emancipated, 
and it is prepared to vindicate, by deeds of heroism, the rights, 
the principles, the dignity of its manhood. 

I think the language of Italy is a case in point. Landor argues 
the profound and hopeless depravity of the Italians from the ab- 
ject character of their complimentary and social dialect, f and the 
phraseology expressive of their relations with their rulers or other 
superiors, as well as from the pompous style by which they mag- 
nify the importance of things in themselves insignificant, and 
their constant use of superlatives and intensives, with reference to 
trifling objects and occasions. "Were it true that the Lombards, 
the Piedmontese, the Tuscans, and the Romans of the present day 
had not inherited, but freely adopted, the dialect of which Landor 
gives a sort of anthology, it would argue much in favor of his 
theory 4 -A- bold and manly and generous and truthful people 

* " 'Tis you that say it, not I. You do the deeds, 
And your ungodly deeds find me the words." 

Sophocles, as translated by Milton. 

f Forms of politeness, especially in foreign languages, are often too severely 
condemned as hypocrisy. Italian kindliness, as every stranger who has lived 
long in Italy will testify, is something more than mere expression, it is genuine, 
and it may in part be the effect of those habits of courteous observance which 
contribute so essentially to the nourishment of that virtue. Exaggerated im- 
pressions with regard to dissimulation, as a characteristic of Italians, have some- 
times arisen from the mistakes of foreigners who misinterpret expressions 
which could not mislead a fellow-countryman. 

X The Imaginary Conversations of Landor are a very indifferent authority 
upon questions of fact, whatever opinions may be entertained concerning them 
as standards in criticism, in language, or in morals. But a physiognomist may 
refer to a caricature for an illustration of the connection between moral traits 
and the physical features by which they are indicated, and I may, with at least 
equal propriety, cite the exaggerations of Landor as exemplifying the manner 
in which external causes may corrupt language, and, through it, the morality 
of those who use it. 

The metamorphosis of the frank, straightforward speech of ancient Rome into 
the cringing form which it has in modern times adopted, is the natural conse- 
quence of centuries of tyrannies, that have crushed not so much the bodies as 
the souls of men who have so long groaned hopelessly under them. But what- 



Lect. x.] LANGUAGE OF ITALY. 195 

certainly would not choose to say umiliare una supplica, 
to humiliate a supplication, for, to present a memorial ; to style 
the strength which awes, and the finesse which deceives, alike, 
o n e s t a , honesty or respectability / to speak of taking human lif e 
by poison, not as a crime, but simply as a mode facilitating death, 
ajutarelamorte; to employ pellegrino, foreign, for 
admirable; to describe a modest brooch as, una spillainoro, 
tempestata di pietre preziose; to call every house with a 
large door, unpalazzo,« palace; a brass ear-ring, una gioja, 
a joy; a present of a bodkin, un r e g a 1 o , « royal munificence ; 
an alteration in a picture, un pentimento, a repentance ; a 
man of honor, un uomo di garbo, a well-dressed man ; a 
lamb's fry, una cosa stupenda, a stupendous thing ; or a 
message sent by a footman to his tailor, through a scullion, una 
ambasciata, cm embassy. 

We must distinguish between cases where words expressive of 
great ideas, mighty truths, do not at all exist in a language, and 
those where, as in Italy, the pressure of external or accidental cir- 
cumstances has compelled the disuse or misapplication of such, 
and the habitual employment of the baser part of the national 

ever may have been the character of the Italians when Landor wrote the dia- 
logue from which I have taken these examples, he would grossly misjudge 
their countrymen of this generation, who should infer that because the language 
has not yet recovered its native majesty, the people is not ripe for an ennobling 
revolution. The habitual speech of the Italians is, at present, by no means of 
so unmanly a character as the author in question represents it, and even when ex- 
pressions, which jar with the self-respect of a citizen of a free state, are employed, 
they are not usually accompanied with a fawning or degradingly deferential man- 
ner, or an ostentatious sacrifice of the rights of private opinion and private 
interest. The leaven of French democracy, which however unsparing in its 
career of overthrow at home, was a beneficent influence in the Italian peninsula, 
is still at work ; the last quarter of a century has brought the principles of 
civil and religious liberty within the intelligence, and commended them to the 
heart, of the masses ; occasion only has long been wanting ; the recent outrage 
perpetrated by the Papal government on the sanctities of domestic life, in the 
kidnapping of a Jewish child, will, it is to be hoped, hasten the dawn of the 
day when the whole Ausonian people shall be transformed, transfigured we 
may say, into what Milton describes as "a noble and puissant nation, rousing 
herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invincible locks." Then 
they will reassert their claim to the divine rights of humanity, and then their 
speech, like themselves, will burst its fetters and become once more as grand 
and as heroic as it is beautiful. 



196 ETHICAL CHAEACTEE OF WOEDS. [Lect. x. 

vocabular y. Where grand words are found in a speech, there grand 
thoughts, noble purposes, high resolves exist also, or at the least, 
the spark slumbers, which a favoring breath may kindle into a 
cherishing or a devouring flame.* 

* The Italian writers of the secolo aureo sometimes show a nice sense of lin- 
guistic propriety in distinguishing between words liable to be confounded. To 
exemplify : modern natural philosophers say that science implies the power of pre- 
diction, that is, the power of saying approximately how substances and bodies, 
whose properties are known, will behave if brought into new combinations or rela- 
tions. Guido dalle Colonne of the 13th century in his Storia della Guerra di Troja, 
(a combination and amplification of Dares Phrygius andDictys Cretensis,) seems 
to have anticipated this idea, for, speaking of Cassandra, p. 106, ed. 1867, he 
says : riluceva nelle arti liberali, dbiendo la conoscenza delle presenti e la scienza 
delle future cose. In none of the Latin texts of Dares and Dictys to which I 
have access do I find any trace of this distinction. Perhaps when we shall 
better understand the nature of man and the history of the past, we shall in 
like manner arrive at a new ' prophetic strain ' in regard to the effect of new 
social conditions. The habits of modern Italian life and thought are unfavor- 
able to such precision, and perhaps their foreign admirers may find for their 
vagueness and want of exactitude in language the same excuse which is al- 
leged for the bulls of the Irish, namely, a rapidity of intellectual action that 
compels them to pass, unnoticed, qualifications and distinctions with which 
Germans usually surround and limit their propositions. The English and 
Americans, and to a less extent the French also, from their more multifarious 
relations with material life, are forced to acquaint themselves with a great va- 
riety of special vocabularies. They consequently employ in refined conversa- 
tion and in literature, a much larger number of semi-technical and descriptive 
terms than do the Italians. Hence Italian pastoral and idyllic poetry is much 
less picturesque than that of the more northern nations. A foreign traveller in 
Italy is often astonished at the difficulty he finds in learning the Italian name 
for a particular flower either from his guide or from his better instructed ac- 
quaintance. The answer almost invariably is ' e unfiore,' or ' e una viola,' and 
it is next to impossible to get anything more definite unless from a professed 
botanist. In conversation, cultivated Italians use fewer terms borrowed from 
agriculture and the mechanic arts than do their northern neighbors. I was 
long in Italy before I could find an Italian equivalent for the English turf or 
greensward, the German Basen, and the French gazon; and the Italian lexi- 
cographers, without exception so far as I have discovered, define semolino to be 
crushed macaroni or pasta, instead of crushed or coarsely ground wheat, which 
it really is, and of which they partake every day of their lives. It may be said 
that generally the Italians employ generic rather than specific terms. The 
foreign sculptors in Italy say that their workmen call all iron tools indiscrim- 
inately ferri, irons, instead of naming the instrument with reference to its office. 
I must admit, however, that Carena and Palma have shown that the Italian 
artizans and farm laborers have at their command an abundant supply of tech- 
nical terms of which the average non-professional Italian makes very little use. 



Lect. x.] ETHICAL CHARACTER OF WORDS. 197 

Every individual is, in a sense, a natural product of the people 
to whom he belongs, and the brave and good, who have so long 
pined in the dungeons of Naples and of Rome, are a sufficient proof 
that the oppression which has lopped the flower, has failed to ex- 
tirpate the root, of Italian virtue. 

For the purposes of intellectual, moral, and especially religious 
culture, a speech must possess appropriate words for the expression 
of all mental, ethical, and spiritual states and processes, and where 
such a nomenclature is totally wanting, there is no depth of de- 
pravity which we are not authorized to infer from so deplorable 
a deficiency of the means of apprehension, reflection, and instruc- 
tion, concerning the cardinal interests, and highest powers and 
perceptions of humanity. It is in the non-existence of words of 
this class, that missionaries, and other teachers of Christianity and 
civilization, have found the most formidable obstacles to the propa- 
gation of intellectual and religious light and truth among the 
heathen. Even the Greek, with all its wealth of words, had, as 
Wesley long ago observed, no term for the Christian virtue of 
humility, until an Apostle framed one for it, and for this the 
moral poverty of the classic speech compelled him to resort to a 
root conveying the idea, not of self-abasement in the consciousness 
of utter unworthiness in the sight of a pure and holy God, but 
of positive debasement, meanness, and miserableness of spirit. 

Let us suppose a people cursed with a speech which had no 
terms corresponding to the ideas of holiness, faith, veneration, 
conscience, truth, justice, dignity, love, mercy, benevolence, or 
their contraries. Could its moral teachers frame an ethical sys- 
tem founded on qualities whose very existence their language, 
and of course the conscious self-knowledge of the people, did not 
recognize ? Could they enforce the duty of truthfulness in word 
and deed ; of a reverential deference to what is great and worthy 
in man ; of love and adoration for the immeasurably higher and 
better attributes of the Deity ; of charity, of philanthropy, of pa- 
tience, and of resignation, in a tongue which possessed no terms 
to denote the moral and the religious virtues ? But even these 
alone would not render a language an adequate medium for the 
communication of all moral doctrine. Men must learn to fear, 
hate, and abhor that which is evil, as well as to love and follow 
after that which is good ; and to this end, the vices, as well as 



198 ETHICAL CHAEACTER OE WORDS. [Lect. x 

the virtues, must have names by which they can be described and 
held up as things to be dreaded, loathed, and shunned. We re- 
gard the Hebrew-Greek diction of the New Testament as emi- 
nently plain and simple, and so indeed it is, as compared with the 
general dialect of Greek literature ; but what a richness of vo- 
cabulary does it display with respect to all that concerns the 
moral, the spiritual, and even the intellectual interests of human- 
ity ! What a range of abstract thought, what an armory of dia- 
lectic weapons, what an enginery of vocal implements for oper- 
ating on the human soul, do the Epistles of the learned Paul ex- 
hibit ! The Gospel of the unschooled John throws forward 
most conspicuously, another phase of language ; for, as Paul ap- 
peals to the moral through the intellectual faculties, John, on the 
other hand, finds his way to the head by the channel of the heart, 
and his diction is of course in great part composed of the words 
which describe or excite the sensibilities, the better sympathies of 
our nature. Now the respective dialects of these two apostles 
could have existed only as the result of a long course of mental 
and religious training in the races who used the speech employed 
by them, and where such training has not been enjoyed, there no 
such vocabulary can be developed, and of course no such doctrine 
expressed. 

Hence the translation of the Bible into the tongues of nations 
of low moral training has been found a matter of exceeding diffi- 
culty, and, in many instances, the translators have been obliged 
to content themselves with very loose approximations to the ex- 
pression of the religious ideas of Christianity, with mere pro- 
visional phrases, which they necessarily employ for the time, and 
until, with more advanced mental culture, there shall grow up also 
a greater compass of vocabulary, and a fuller development of a 
dialect suited to convey moral as well as intellectual truth. And 
hence it is that in the propagation of a religion which appeals so 
powerfully to the thought, the sympathies, and the conscience of 
men, education and Christianization must go hand in hand ; for 
the teacher cannot reach the heart of his pupil, until they have 
mutually aided each other in creating a common medium, through 
which they can confer on the deep matters of moral and spiritual 
truth. 

The French boast that they have no word for bribe, and hence 



Lect. x.l ETHICAL CHARACTER OF WORDS. 199 

argue that they are less accessible than other men to that species 
of official corruption, of which a pecuniary, or other material 
consideration, is the reward. But has not the reproach implied 
in the very word a useful influence in bringing the act to the con- 
sciousness of men as a shame and a sin % Can we fully compre- 
hend the evil character of a wrong, until we have given it a spe- 
cific objective existence by assigning to it a name which shall 
serve at once to designate and to condemn ? And do not the 
jocular pot de vin, and other vague and trivial phrases, by 
which, in the want of a proper term to stigmatize the crime, 
French levity expresses it, indicate a lack of sensibility to the 
heinous nature of the transgression, and gloss over, and even half 
commend, the reception of unlawful fees, as at worst but a venial 
offence, the disgrace of which lies more in the detection than in 
the commission ? * 

I drew your attention, on a former occasion, to the remarkable 
completeness of the technical vocabulary of Christianity in An- 
glo-Saxon, as exemplified in the old translation of the Gospels ; 
and I think it is much to be regretted that the great English 
theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not 
endeavor, at a period when it would have been comparatively easy, 
to infuse a still larger proportion of the native element into the 
moral and spiritual nomenclature they adopted. The extent to 
which Latin was used in theology by the Saxons themselves, 
seriously interfered with the formation of a vocabulary adapted 
to the metaphysics of Christianity, and we must remember that, 
as Latin was the only common language, and practicable means 
of communication, between the English Reformers and their 
teachers and brethren on the continent, the dialect of the former 
could hardly fail to be affected by the religious nomenclature of 
the latter. 



* When Justinian negotiated with the Persian ambassador Isdiagunas that 
shameful convention, by which he purchased a truce of five years for two 
thousand pounds of gold, it was at first proposed that the money should he 
paid in annual instalments of four hundred pounds, but upon further con- 
sideration, it was thought better to pay the whole at once, in order that it 
might be called a present, rather than a tribute. Td vap alaxpb. bvdfiara, 
says Procopius, bv -a tt pay uar a kiu&aaiv av&puTrot i/c rov kiuTT/ielcTov 
aioxveoticu. De Bel. Goth. L. IV. cap. 15. 



200 RELIGIOUS TEEMS. [Lect. x. 

We have, nevertheless, and exclusively employ, many remark- 
able native English words to express the highest and most com- 
plex order of religions ideas, and the frequency and familiarity of 
their nse implies an advanced spiritual culture among the primi- 
tive English, a philosophical conception of Christian doctrine, and 
a strong native susceptibility to religious impressions, as well as a 
remarkable power of apprehending abstruse principles, and of 
course a high standard of moral and intellectual character. 

The word atonement, certainly one of the most important 
terms in the nomenclature of Christianity, is purely English, 
although its ending is French. The historical evidence is very 
strongly in favor of the etymology at one, and accordingly the 
derivative should mean either the reconciliation of man to his 
Creator, or a oneness of spirit between the two.* But this is not 
the usual theological sense, and the resemblance between atone 
and the German S u h n e , and several older Gothic roots which 
involve the notion of expiation, furnishes some reason to suspect 
that the real origin of the word lies further back, though we can- 
not trace it to any known Saxon radical. God, good, holy, had, 
evil, sin, wicked, right, wrong, love, hate,-f hope, wise, true, 
false, \ life, death, soul, heaven, hell, and their many derivatives, 



* Robert of Gloucester has at on, in the sense of agreed, reconciled : 

Wat halt it to telle longe ? bute heo were se|>f>e at on, 
In gret loue longe y now, wan yt nolde of>er gon. 

P. 161. 
So that the king & he 
Were there so at on as hii mizte bise. 

P. 509. 

Many similar examples may be found in other early English writers. I have 
not observed the noun atonement in any writer before Tyndal (1526), who em- 
ploys it in Romans v. 11. It is not found in the Wycliffite vesions, I believe. 
Coverdale (1535) uses it, in Exodus xxix. 33, Leviticus iv. 20, 26, Romans v. 
11, and in several other passages. It also occurs in Sir Thomas More's Life of 
Richard III., Rastell's edition, p. 40, F., p. 41, C, as well as in the Life of 
Edward V., ascribed to the same author, in Hardyng's Chronicles, 1543, p. 
476 of Ellis's reprint. 

f What a fine English definition of hate is that which Chaucer gives in the 
Persones Tale, " Hate is old wrathe." 

Cicero, Tusc. JDisp., iv. 9, says : Odium ira inveterata 

% We cannot perhaps make out an etymological relation between false and 
any Mceso-Gothic root, unless we connect it with faldan, to fold, Lat. 
plicare, allied to which are simplex and duplex, whence our sim- 



Lect. x.] EELIGIOUS TEEMS. 201 

are all genuine Anglo-Saxon, as are also many now obsolete words, 
belonging exclusively to the Christian religion, such as housel, for 
eucharist, aneal,* to administer extreme unction, though most 
of the words which Christianity ingrafted upon the religious vo- 
cabulary of Judaism, are in modern English represented by deriv- 
atives from Latin or Greek radicals. 

Both the moral and the intellectual characteristics which the 
prevalence of Christian doctrine has impressed on modern civil- 
ized humanity, and the dialect belonging to that doctrine, are so 
special and peculiar, that the mutual relations between mind, and 
speech as the expression of mind, and as also a reagent upon it, 
in all matters connected with religion, are traced without any 
very serious difficulty but the reciprocal influence of word and 
thought in other connections, is, if not more obscure, at least less 
familiar. Take for example the tendency, in what are fashion- 

plicity and duplicity. But the word occurs very early in all the Scandinavian 
and Teutonic languages, and there are several native radicals from either of 
which it may be supposed to be derived, if indeed we are to believe that the 
name of so fundamental an idea as that of the false must necessarily be bor- 
rowed from any other word. Ihre, in arguing against the etymology from the 
Latin f a 1 s u s , regrets that he is obliged to recognize the word as indigenous, 
and exclaims, Quam vellem in laudem gentis nostras dici posse, illam mendacia 
et f allendi artes ne nominare quidem potuisse, antequam id a" Latinis didicerit ! 
Ihre, Lex. Suio-Goth. under f alsk. 

The comparison of the moral significance of particular words in Anglo- 
Saxon and English, presents many points of interest. A single one shall 
suffice. Old, which is now a term of reproach, was, strange as it may seem 
in these fast days of Young America and Young England, a respectful and 
even reverential epithet with the Anglo-Saxons ; so much so, in fact, that it 
was the common designation of noble, exalted, and excellent things. E a 1 d o r 
was often used for prince, ruler, governor; ealdordom was authority, 
magistracy, principality ; ealdorlic, principal, excellent; ealdor-apos- 
t o 1 e , chief-apostle ; ealdor-burh, chief city or metropolis, and e a 1 d o r - 
man, alderman, nobleman. 

* Ele or sel, the root of the word aneal, is generally considered an 
Anglo-Saxon radical, but its resemblance in form and meaning to the Latin 
oleum, or rather to the Greek klaiov, renders it probable that the name, as 
well as the thing, (olive oil,) found its way from Southern Europe into the 
Anglo-Saxon and the cognate languages and nations, at so early a period that 
the history of its introduction can be no longer traced. Housel (A. S. h u s e 1) 
has been suspected to be connected with the Latin h o s t i a , but the occur- 
rence of the word (hunsl) in Ulphilas seems to be a sufficient refutation of 
this etymology. 



202 KEACTIOST OF WOEDS. [Lect. x. 

able, and claim to be refined, circles in this country, and perhaps 
even more especially in England, to the nse of vague and indefinite 
phrases, not so much to hide a deficiency of ideas, as to cover dis- 
creet reticences of opinion, or prudent suppressions of natural and 
spontaneous feeling. The practice of employing these empty 
sounds — they have no claim to be called words — is founded partly 
in a cautious desire of avoiding embarrassing self-committals, 
and partly in that vulgar prejudice of polite society, which pro- 
scribes the expression of decided sentiments of admiration, ap- 
proval or dissatisfaction, or of precise and definite opinions upon 
any subject, as contrary to the laws of good taste, indicative of a 
want of knowledge of the world, and, moreover, arrogant and 
pedantic. In this notion there is just enough of truth to disguise 
the falsehood of the theory, and to apologize for the mischievous 
tendencies of the practice. Doubtless, if we have no clear, de- 
cided, and well-grounded opinions, no ardor of feeling, and no 
convictions of duty, in reference to the subject of conversation, 
we should modestly avoid the use of pointed language ; and, at 
the same time, a due regard for the feelings, the prejudices, the 
ignorance, of others, will dictate a certain reserve and caution in 
the expression of opinions or sentiments which may wound their 
pride, or violently shock their prepossessions. 

But the habit of using vague language at all, and especially the 
current devices for hinting much while affirming nothing, are in 
a high degree injurious both to precision and justness of thought, 
and to sincerity, frankness, and manliness of character. Every 
vague and uncertain proposition has its false side, and the confu- 
sion of thought it implies is not more offensive to good taste, than 
its deceptive character to sound morality, and than both to true 
refinement. 

There is a fact of immense moral significance, which seems to 
have been only in modern, indeed in comparatively recent, times, 
brought into notice and made matter of distinct consciousness, 
though accessible to the observation of men ever since words 
first had a moral meaning. Its discovery is perhaps connected 
with the increased attention which individual words, their form and 
force, have received in the study of the philosophy of language. It 
is one of those instances where, in the progress of humanity, we 
come suddenly upon the outcrop of one of those great truths, 



Lect. x.] EEACTIOJST OF WOEDS. 203 

which, like some rock-strata, extend for many days' journey but a 
few inches beneath the surface, and then burst abruptly into full 
view.* 

The fact to which I allude is that language is not a dead, une- 
lastic, passive implement, but a power, which, like all natural 
powers, reacts on that which it calls into exercise. It is a psycho- 
logical law, though we know not upon what ultimate principle it 
rests, that the mere giving of verbal utterance to any strong emotion 
or passion, even if the expression be unaccompanied by any other 
outward act, stimulates and intensifies the excitement of feeling 
to that degree that when the tongue is once set free, the reason is 
dethroned, and brute nature becomes the master of the man.f The 
connection between the apparently insignificant cause and the ter- 
rible effect belongs to that portion of the immaterial man, whose 
workings, in so many fields of moral and intellectual action, he 
below our consciousness, and can be detected by no effort of vol- 
untary self -inspection. But it is an undoubted fact, and a fact of 
whose fearful import most men become adequately aware only 
when it is almost too late to profit by the knowledge, that the 
forms in which we clothe the outward expression of the emotions, 
and even of the speculative opinions, within us, react with mighty 
force upon the heart and intellect which are the seat of those pas- 
sions and those thoughts. So long as we have not betrayed by 
unequivocal words the secret of the emotions that sway the 
soul, so long as we are uncommitted by formal expressions to par- 
ticular principles and opinions, so long we are strong to subdue 
the rising passion, free to modify the theories upon which we aim 
to fashion our external lif e. Fiery words are the hot blast that 
inflames the fuel of our passionate nature, and formulated doctrine 
a hedge that confines the discursive wandering of the thoughts. 

* Thus the iniquity of the slave-trade was suddenly brought home, as a sin, 
to the conscience of otherwise good men, who had for many years pursued it 
without one reproachful feeling, one thought of its enormous wickedness. 

f Spenser was not ignorant of this important law. 

"But his enemie 
Had kindled such coles of displeasure, 
That the goodman noulde stay his leasure, 
But home him hasted with furious heate, 
Encreasing his wrath with many a threate." 

The Shepheards Calendar, Februarie, 190-4. ' 



204: EEACTION OF WOEDS. [Lect. X. 

In a personal altercation, it is most often the stimnlns men give 
themselves by stinging words, that impels them to violent acts, 
and in argumentative discussions, we find the most convincing 
support to onr conclusions in the internal echo of the dogmas we 
have ourselves pronounced. Hence extreme circumspection in 
the use of vituperative language, and in the adoption of set phrases 
implying particular opinions, is not less a prudential than a moral 
duty, and it is equally important that we strengthen in ourselves 
kindly sympathies, generous impulses, noble aims, and lofty aspi- 
rations, by habitual freedom in their expression, and that we con- 
firm ourselves in the great political, social, moral, and religious 
truths, to which calm investigation has led us as final conclusions, 
by embodying them in forms of sound words. 

Not merely the strongest thinkers, and ablest and most con- 
vincing reasoners, but many of the most impressive and persua- 
sive rhetoricians of modern times, have been remarkable rather 
for moderation than exaggeration in expression. It was a maxim 
of Webster's, that violence of language was indicative of feeble- 
ness of thought and want of reasoning power, and it was his prac- 
tice rather to understate than overstate the strength of his confi- 
dence in the soundness of his own arguments, and the logical 
necessity of his conclusions. He kept his auditor constantly in 
advance of him, by suggestion rather than by strong asseveration, 
by a calm exposition of considerations which ought to excite feel- 
ing in the heart of both speaker and hearer, not by an undignified 
and theatrical exhibition of passion in himself. And this indeed 
is the sound practical interpretation of the Horatian precept : 

Si vis me fiere, dolendum est 
Prinmm ipsi tibi. 

Wouldst thou unseal the fountain of my tears, 
Thyself the signs of grief must show. 

To the emotion of the hearer, the poet applies a stronger word, 
f 1 e r e , to weep, than to that of the speaker or actor, who best 
accomplishes the aims of his art by a more mitigated display of 
the passions he would excite in the breast of his auditor. 

Although our inherent or acquired moral and intellectual char- 
acter and tendencies, and our habitual vocabulary and forms of 
speech, are influential upon each other, and though both are sub- 



Lect. x.] CHOICE OF DICTION. 205 

ject to the control of the will, jet, nevertheless, their reciprocal 
action is not usually matter of consciousness with us. While 
therefore we are/m? in the employment of particular sets of words, 
yet as the selection of • those words depends upon obscure pro- 
cesses unintelligible even to ourselves, we cannot be said, in strict 
propriety of speech, to choose our dialect, though we are un- 
doubtedly responsible for its moral character, because we are re- 
sponsible for the moral condition which determines it. So lim- 
ited is our self-knowledge in this respect, that most men would 
be unable to produce a good caricature of their own individual 
speech, and the shibboleth of our personal dialect is generally 
unknown to ourselves, however ready we may be to remark the 
characteristic phraseology of others. It is a mark of weakness, 
of poverty of speech, or at least of bad taste, to continue the use 
of pet words, or other peculiarities of language, after we have 
once become conscious of them as such. In dialect as in dress, 
individuality, founded upon any thing but general harmony and 
superior propriety, is offensive, and good taste demands that each 
shall please by its total impression, not by its distinguishable 
details. 



LECTTJEE XI. 

VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

IV. 

I endeavored in the last lecture to point ont some of the re- 
lations between the moral and intellectual character of nations or 
individuals, and the words of a given language employed, at par- 
ticular periods, by the people or the man. But speech is affected 
also by humbler, more transitory, and more superficial influences, 
and whatever care we may exercise in this respect, it is scarcely 
possible that our ordinary discourse should not exhibit indelible 
traces of the associations and accidents of childhood, as well as of 
the occupations and the cares, the objects and studies, the material 
or social struggles, the triumphs or defeats, in short, all the exter- 
nal conditions that affect humanity in riper years. Every mode 
of life, too, has its technical vocabulary,* which we may exclude 
from our habitual language, its cant, which we cannot; and 
hence an acute observer, well schooled in men and things, can 
read, in a brief casual conversation with strangers, much of the 
history, as well as of the opinions and the principles, of all the 
interlocutors. 

Writers of works of fiction are much inclined to represent their 
characters as constantly employing the language of their calling, 
and as prone to apply its technicalities to objects of an entirely 
diverse nature. Now this may, in the drama, where formal nar- 
rative, description, and explanation of all sorts are to be avoided, 
serve as a convenient conventional mode of escaping the asides, 
the soliloquies, the confidential disclosures of the actor to his 
audience respecting his character, position, and purposes, and the 

* How are technical words of new arts formed — e. g. of printing ? A com- 
plete history of words of this class from the beginning would be as instructive 
as curious. 

(206) 



Lect. xi.] PKOEESSIOJSTAL DIALECT. 207 

other awkward devices to which even the expertest histrionic 
artisans are sometimes obliged to resort, to make the action more 
intelligible. It is better that a character in a play should use 
professional phrases, by way of indicating his occupation, than 
that he should tell the audience in set words, "I am a merchant, 
a physician, or a lawyer," but after all, considered as a represen- 
tation of the actual language of life, it is a violation of truth of 
costume to cram with technical words the conversation of a tech- 
nical man.* All men, except the veriest, narrowest pedants in 
their craft, avoid the language of the shop, and a small infusion 
of native sense of propriety prevents the most ignorant laborer 
from obtruding the dialect of his art upon those with whom he 
communicates in reference to matters not pertaining to it. Every 
man affects to be, if not socially above, yet intellectually inde- 
pendent of, and superior to, his calling, and if in this respect his 
speech bewray him, it will be by words used in mere joke, or by 
such peculiarities of speech, as, without properly belonging to the 
exercise of his profession, have nevertheless been occasioned by 
it. A sailor will not be likely to interlard his go-ashore talk with 
clew-lines, main-sheets, and halliards, but if he has occasion to 
mention the great free port at the head of the Adriatic, he will 
call it not Trieste, but Try east / and if he speaks of our com- 
mercial representative at a maritime town, he will be sure to style 
that official the American counsel, not the American consul. In 
fact, classes, guilds, professions, borrow their characteristics of 
speech from the affectations, not the serious interests, of their way 
of life. 

Technical nomenclature rarely extends beyond the sphere to 
which it more appropriately belongs, and the language of a nation 
is not perceptibly affected by the phraseology of a class, unless 
that class is so numerous as to constitute the majority, or unless 
its interests are of so wide-spread and conspicuous a nature as to 
be forced upon the familiar observation of the whole people. 
England has been distinguished above all the nations of the earth 

* King James, in his treatise of the Airt of Scottis Poesie, lays down a con- 
trary rule : 

And finally, quhatsumeuer be zour subiect, to vse vocabula artis, quhairby 
ze may the mair vivelie represent that persoun, quhais pairt ze paint out. 
—Chap. III. 



208 NEW WOEDS, OEIGIN OF. [Lect. se. 

for commercial enterprise and mechanical production, but her 
navigation is confined to the sea-coast, her manufacturing industry 
to comparatively restricted centres. Of course, so far as foreign 
trade and domestic fabrics are concerned, the names of the new 
objects which they have brought to the notice of all English-born 
people, have become familiar to all ; nevertheless, we do not find 
that metaphors from the dialect of the sea, or technicalities from 
the phraseology of the workshop, are much more frequent in the 
literature or popular speech of England than in those of countries 
with little navigation or mechanical industry. On the other hand, 
figures drawn from agriculture, which is universal, and from those 
arts which, like spinning and weaving, the fishery and the chase, 
in early stages of society entered into the life of every household, 
are become essential elements of both the poetical and the every- 
day dialect of every civilized people. 

In language, general effects are produced only by causes general 
in their immediate operation. Eor is the fact that new words, 
originated by causes local in their source and apparently trivial 
and transitory in action, not unfrequently pass into the common 
vocabulary of the nation, at all in conflict with this principle, for, 
in such cases, the general reception of the word is indicative of a 
general want of it, to express some common idea just making its 
way into distinct consciousness, and waiting only for a formula, 
an appropriate mode of utterance. 

Whenever a people, by emigration into a different soil and 
climate, by a large influx of foreigners into its territory, by politi- 
cal or religious revolutions, or other great and comprehensive 
social changes, is brought into contact with new objects, new cir- 
cumstances, new cares, labors, and duties, it is obviously under 
the necessity of framing or borrowing new words, or of modify- 
ing the received meaning of old ones, in such way as to express 
the new conditions of material existence, the new aims and ap- 
petencies, to which the change in question gives birth. * 

* I regret that I cannot here fully avail myself of the remarkable illustration 
of the truth of the above statement, afforded by the great changes which have 
taken place in colloquial and familiarly written Italian during the last quarter 
of a century. I may, perhaps, on another occasion, have an opportunity of 
giving some examples of really important gains, not only in an enlarged vo- 
cabulary, but in directness of style and in definiteness of expression. 

Twenty-five years ago one of the first things that struck an Englishman or 



Lect. xi.] NEW USES OF WOKDS. 209 

If we could suppose the whole population of a Greek island to 
be transported to America, dispersed among us, and, after being 
detained long enough to learn our language and forget their own, 
to be restored to their native soil, to resume their former habits 
of life, and thenceforward to continue to exist, without commu- 
nication with neighboring islands or foreign countries, but other- 
wise in the same circumstances under which the people of the 
Grecian archipelago and mainland have formed the Greek charac- 
ter and the Greek speech, they and their posterity would certainly 
not re-create and re-develop the Hellenic tongue, but they would 
retain the English as their national language, modifying it accord- 
ing to the exigencies of their situation, and it would, in the course 
of time, become a very different dialect from that which they had 
brought back with them. But what would be the nature of the 



an American, in familiar intercourse with an Italian, was the endless circum- 
locutions made use of by the latter in both his oral and his written communi- 
cations. A statement which either of the two former would make in five lines, 
would require pages from the pen of the Italian. This difference arose, not 
from lack of flexibility in the Italian language, but from the fact that custom 
had established certain stereotyped introductory and leave-taking phrases, 
which, from the national point of view, could not be omitted without dis- 
courtesy. The new condition of things, brought about in Italy by the astound- 
ing political revolutions that have made it a great and independent nation, now 
leaves the Italian as little time for formalities as has the American or English- 
man. Consequently his advertisements, his railway and hotel notices, even 
his notes of familiar correspondence, are cut short proportionally. The fol- 
lowing may serve as specimens of recent colloquial and journalistic phrase- 
ology : 

Trreperibilitd del destinitario — impossibility of finding the person addressed. 
Caldeggiare la candidatura — to be active in promoting the election of the ticket. 
Slatinare — to speak Latin badly. Smelare — to take honey from the honey- 
comb. * * e questi quatlro insieme ministeriazzerebbero tutto il gruppo piemon- 
tese — and these four together would carry the whole Piedmontese faction over 
to the side of the Ministry. Sveccliiare V Enciclopedia — to publish a revised 
edition of the Encyclopedia. Fare una gita al Vesuvio per euriosare Veruzione. 
Here the word euriosare is evidently not used in the sense given in Tommaseo's 
Dictionary, namely, to show idle or impertinent curiosity, and as the true source 
of growth in a language is in the spontaneous popular speech, this word will 
no doubt gradually acquire the more worthy meaning. The following imagin- 
ary conversation between two Italian members of Parliament is taken from a 
leading Roman paper : "Ma, capisci? H Minghetti! " "Ma clie Minghetti mi 
mi minghettando ! " This forcibly recalls a scene in Shakespeare : Mrs. Page — 
Come, mother Prat, come, give me your hand. Ford — I'll prat her ! 



210 NEW USES OF WOKDS. [Lect. xi. 

change ? Probably not in radical syntactical principle or other 
grammatical peculiarities, but mainly, doubtless, in the vocabulary.* 
New words would be formed by derivation or composition, to 
express a multitude of objects, processes, and conditions for 
which English has no appropriate designations, but a still greater 
divergence from the original tongue would be produced by the 
employment of English words in new or modified senses. All 
this, in fact, is just what has been done, by the people of whom 
I am speaking, with the language of their country. Causes, to 
which I shall refer in discussing the subject of grammatical in- 
flections, have considerably modified the Greek syntax in the 
passage from old Hellenic to modern Romaic, but a greater ap- 
parent change has been produced by the introduction of new 
words ; a greater still, which is not apparent except upon a con- 
siderable familiarity with both classic and modern Greek, by the 
use of classical words in senses very diverse from those which 
originally belonged to them. 

A more familiar illustration may be found in the speech of our 
own country. At the period when European colonists first took 
possession of the Atlantic coast of America, natural history had 
taught men little of the inexhaustible variety of the material 
creation. The discoverers expected to find the same animals, the 
same vegetables, the same minerals, and even the same arts, with 
which observation had made them familiar in corresponding lati- 
tudes of the eastern hemisphere. They came therefore prepared 
to recognize resemblances, not to detect differences, between the 
products of the old world and the new, and naturally saw what 
they sought and expected. Their early reports accordingly make 

* Hervas mentions the case of a South American language which, retaining 
its original grammar, had substituted for its native vocabulary one consisting 
entirely of Spanish words ; but this statement must be received with some al- 
lowance, for we can hardly suppose that all the native roots had been absolutely 
obliterated. A language which has totally changed its vocabulary, as in the 
instance above cited, does not remain the same language even though its gram- 
matical form continues unaltered. New words imply new ideas the force of 
which cannot depend entirely upon grammatical combination. Thus languages 
from different sources might approximate in form, though not in radical sig- 
nification. Would they therefore become one ? Man and many of the lower 
animals are Osteologically the same, but we do not therefore call them by a 
common name. 



Lect. xi.] SPECIAL USES OE WOEDS. 211 

constant mention of plants, animals, and mechanical processes, as 
of common occurrence in America, bnt which we now know never 
to have existed on this continent. Longer acquaintance with the 
nature and art of the newly discovered territory corrected the 
errors of the first hasty observation ; but there was still, though 
almost never an identity, yet often a strong analogy, between the 
trees, the quadrupeds, the fish, and the fowl of England, of 
France, and of Spain, on the one hand, and of Canada, [New 
England, Yirginia, and Mexico on the other. The native names 
for all these objects were hard to pronounce, harder still to re- 
member, and the colonists, therefore, took the simple and obvious 
method of applying to the native products of America the names 
of the European plants and animals which most nearly resembled 
them. Thus, we have the oak, the pine, the poplar, the willow, 
the fir, the beach, and the ash ; the trout, the perch, and the dace ; 
the bear, the fox, and the rabbit ; the pigeon, the partridge, the 
robin, and the sparrow ; and in South America, the lion and the 
ostrich ; and yet, though in many instances the American and the 
transatlantic object designated by these names belong to the same 
genus, and are only distinguished by features which escape all 
eyes but those of the scientific naturalist, in perhaps none are 
they specifically identical, while, not unfrequently, the applica- 
tion of the European name is founded on very slight resem- 
blances. 

Since the ]N r orman Conquest, English, as spoken upon its native 
soil, has been largely exposed to but one of the causes of change 
which I have noticed. I refer, of course, to the great religious 
revolution of the sixteenth century, which I believe to be the 
most powerful of the single influences that have concurred to give 
to the English, race and their speech the character which now dis- 
tinguishes them, as well from the rest of the world as from their 
former selves.* At the same time, in all the Gothic languages, 

* The opinions expressed by Michelet, on the moral and religious character 
of English literature, are a remarkable exemplification of the great difficulty 
of acquiring such a mastery over a foreign tongue, as to be thoroughly com- 
petent to exercise the function of literary criticism upon works written in it. 
In a note to p. 158, Vol. V., of his Histoire de France, Michelet says : " Je ne 
me rappelle pas d'avoir vu le nom de Dieu dans Shakespeare ; s'il y est c'est 
bien rarement, par hasard, et sans l'ombre d'un sentiment religieux." Mrs. 



212 SPECIAL USES OF WOEDS. [Lect. xi. 

our own included, both the special vocabulary of each, and the 
use and signification of the words they possess in common, have 
been much affected by other causes, partly peculiar to one or 
more, partly acting alike upon all. 

Take as an instance the word winter. When Icelandic was 
spoken in all the countries of Scandinavia, time was computed by 
winters, because in those cold climates the winter monopolized a 
large portion of the year, and from its length, its hardships and 
necessities, its boisterous festivities, the facilities it afforded for 
the pursuit of certain important occupations and favorite sports, 
and the obstacles it interposed to the prosecution of others, it im- 
pressed itself on the minds of the people as not only the longest 
but the weightiest portion of the twelvemonth, and it therefore 
stood for the whole year. For the same reason, winter was a 
very common word for year in Anglo-Saxon, and it continued to 
be employed in that sense in English to near the close of the 
fifteenth century. In Iceland itself, where there is little change 
in the habits of material and social life, it is still thus used. But 
in modern England, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the advance- 
ment of civilization and physical improvement has given to man 
the mastery over all the seasons. The campaigns of feudal war- 
fare, whose marches were performed with greater ease over ice 
and snow, have ceased; the chase, a winter occupation, is no 
longer an important resource; agriculture has widely extended 
her domain, and the harvest months are the great epoch of the 
year, and characterize it as a period of trial or of blessings. Accord- 
ingly, in all these kingdoms men now count time not by winters, 
but by harvests, for that is the primitive signification of our 
English word year, and its representative in the cognate lan- 

Cowden Clarke's Concordance cites from Shakespeare many hundreds of .pas- 
sages in which the name of God is introduced, frequently, indeed, in profane 
phrases ; but it occurs in expressions of reverent and devout religious senti- 
ment quite as often in the works of the great English dramatist as in the cur- 
rent French literature of the corresponding period. The remarks of Michelet 
upon English literature generally, which precede and follow the above criti- 
cism upon Shakespeare, and in which he characterizes the belle et sombre lit- 
terature Anglaise, as sceptique, Judaique, satanique, pour resumer, anticlire- 
tienne, are extremely amusing, and might well be supposed to have originated 
with the spiritual father of the American Indian whom he quotes as saying : 
V Le Christ, c'etait un Frangais que les Anglais crucifierent d Londres." 






Lect. xi.] SPECIAL USES OF WOEDS. 213 

guages.* In the figurative style, whether in poetry or in prose, 
we often pnt a season for the year, and in this case the subject deter- 
mines the choice of the season. Thus, of an aged man we say : ' His 
life has extended to a hundred winters,' but in speaking of the 
years of a blooming girl, we connect with them images of glad- 
ness, the season of flowers, and say : ' She has seen sixteen sum- 
mers.' We have in English a similar application of another fa- 
miliar word suggestive of the phases of the year, and it is curious 
that the same expression is used in Scandinavia. In Denmark 
and Sweden, as well as in England, the gentlemen of the chase and 
the turf reckon the age of their animals by springs, the ordinary 
birth-season of the horse, and a colt is said to be so many years 
old next grass. 

Our adjective pecuniary is familiarly known to be derived from 
the Latin p e c u n i a , money, which itself comes from p e c u s , 
cattle, and acquired the meaning of money, because money is the 
representative of property, and in early society cattle constituted 
the most valuable species of property ; or, as others suppose, be- 
cause a coin, which was of about the average value of one head of 
sheep or kine, was stamped with the image of the creature. Our 
English word cattle\ is derived, by a reverse process, from the 

* I am aware that this is not the received etymology of year, nor do I pro- 
pose it with by any means entire confidence. At the same time, I think the 
identity of the words for harvest and for the twelvemoth, ar, in the cognate 
Icelandic and the dialects derived from it, an argument of considerable weight 
in support of the derivation, which, however, finds still stronger evidence in 
the analogies of our primitive mother-tongue. In Anglo-Saxon, ear signfies 
an ear of grain, and by supplying the collective prefix g e , common to all the 
Teutonic languages, we have gear, an appropriate expression for harvest, and 
at the same time a term, which, as well as winter, was employed as the name 
of the entire year. The corresponding words in the cognate languages admit 
of a similar derivation, and this to me seems a more probable etymology, than 
those by which these words are connected with remoter roots. 

This etymology, though original with me, I find has been anticipated by 
Terwen and Bosworth. 

f The derivation from caput, (capitale,) a head, as we say, " so many 
head of sheep, or oxen," though supported by high authorities, is improbable ; 
because among other reasons, the words, chat el , cat all a (pi.), &c. , were 
applied to what lawyers call chattels real, that is, certain rights in real estate 
distinct from the/ee, or absolute title, and to personal property in general, long 
before cattle, or any other derivation from the same root, was used specially as 
a designation of domestic quadrupeds. This view of the subject is confirmed 



214 SPECIAL USES OF WOEDS. [Lect. xi. 

Low Latin cat alia, a word of unknown etymology, signifying 
movable property generally, or what the English law calls chat- 
tels. In Old English, cattle had the same meaning, and it is but 
recently that it has been confined to domestic quadrupeds as the 
most valuable of ordinary movable possessions. 

In a former lecture, by way of illustrating my views of the 
value of etymology as pursued by what may be called the simple 
historical, in distinction from the more ambitious linguistic, 
method, I traced the word grain from its source, through its sec- 
ondary, to its present signification, in one of its senses. Corn, 
the Gothic etymological equivalent of grain, has also an interest- 
ing history, and it serves as a good exemplification of the modifi- 
cations which the use and meaning of words undergo from the 
influence of local conditions. Like granum, it signifies both 
a seed and a minute particle, and the two words are not so unlike 
in form as to make it all improbable that they are derived from a 
common radical, in some older cognate language, probably allied to 
the verb to grow, and originally meaning seed. Corn was early ap- 
plied, as a generic term, to the cereal grains or breadstuffs, the 
most useful of seeds, and in fact almost the only ones regularly 
employed as the food of man. The word is still current in all 
countries where the Gothic languages are spoken, but its signifi- 
cation is, in popular use, chiefly confined to the particular grain 
most important in the rural economy of each. Thus in England, 
wheat, being the most considerable article of cultivated produce, 
is generally called corn. In Scotland this name is given to oats ; 
in most parts of Germany to rye ; in the Scandinavian kingdoms 

by the fact of the non-existence of a cognate word with the meaning of cattle 
in the Italian and Spanish languages, which could hardly have failed to pos- 
sess it, had it been really of Latin etymology. 

Chat el has an apparent relationship both to the French acheter, to pur- 
chase, and to the Saxon cedpian , Icelandic Ka up a, German Ka ufe n , 
of the same signification. 

Celtic etymologists derive acheter from the Celtic a chap , a word of 
the same radical meaning ; but as the Goths, in early ages, were a much more 
commercial and maritime people than the Celts, it is more probable that the 
root is Gothic than Celtic. 

Cap it ale , chat el, acheter, chattels and cattle, are, therefore, in all 
probability, cognate with the Saxon cedpia n, and not with caput. Schmid, 
Oesetze der Angel- Sachsen, 2d Edition, 1858, glossary, under cap it ale appears 
to adopt this etymolgy. See Wedgewood, Etym. Diet., Art. Chattels. 



Lect. xi.] SPECIAL USES OF WOKDS. 215 

to barley ; and in the United States, to onr great agricultural 
staple, maize, or Indian corn ;• the name in every instance being 
habitually applied to the particular grain on which the prosperity 
of the husbandman and the sustenance of the laborer chiefly 
depend.* 

In the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, and in other 
warm climates, animal food is not much used, and bread is em- 
phatically the staff of life. Hence in those nations, as with the 
ancient Romans, the word bread stands for food generally, other 
edibles being considered a mere relish or accompaniment, and 
this is still true of some colder climates, where the poverty of the 
laboring classes confines them in the main to a like simple diet. 
The English figurative use of bread for the same purpose, how- 
ever, is not founded on the habits of the people, but is borrowed 
from other literatures. The word meat has undergone a contrary 
process. The earliest occurrence of this word in any cognate lan- 
guage is the form mats in Ulphilas, where it signifies food in 
general. The Swedish verb m a 1 1 a , to satiate or satisfy, and 
other allied words, suggest the probability that the original sense 
of the radical, in its application to food, was that which satisfies 
hunger, f though it must be confessed that great uncertainty 
attends all attempts to trace back words essentially so primitive 
to still simpler forms and less complex significations. The Anglo- 
Saxon and oldest English meaning of meat is food, and I believe 
it is always used in that sense in our English translations of the 
Bible. In England, and especially in the United States, animal 
food is now the most prominent article of diet, and meat has come 
to signify almost exclusively the flesh of land animals. 

The primitive abundance of the oak and of nut-bearing trees,, 
in England and in the northern portions of Continental Europe^ 
facilitated the keeping of swine to an extent which, now that the 

* In Italy, civaje (Latin, cibraria) is the common name given to all kinds of 
pulse, as pease, beans, etc., these constituting a large portion of the food of the 
poorer Italians. 

f The Mceso-Gothic m a t j a n , to eat, is more probably a derivative, than 
the primitive, of mats, and if so, corresponds to our verb to feed upon. On 
the other hand the resemblance between matjan and the Latin masti- 
care would seem to refer both verbs and their derivatives to a root expres- 
sive of the mechanical process of eating. 



216 SPECIAL USES OP WORDS. [Lect. xi. 

forests have been converted into arable land, is neither convenient 
nor economically advantageous, and the flesh of swine constituted 
a more important part of the aliment of the people than that of 
any other domestic animal. The word flesh appears to have 
originally signified pork only, and in the form, a flitch of bacon, 
French, fleche de lard, the primitive sense is still preserved ; but, 
with the extension of agriculture, the herds of swine became less 
numerous, and as the flesh of other quadrupeds entered more and 
more into use, the sense of the word was extended so as to include 
them also. Flesh and meat have now become nearly synony- 
mous, the difference being that the former embraces the fibrous 
part of animals generally, without reference to its uses, the latter 
that of such only as are employed for human food. At present 
we use, as a compendious expression for all the materials of both 
vegetable and animal diet, bread and meat. Piers Ploughman 

says: 

Flesshe and breed bothe 
To riche and to poore; 

and a verse or two lower, 

And all manere of men 

That through mete and drynke libbeth. 

The English word bribe and its derivatives, generally but per- 
haps erroneously traced to the French bribe, a morsel of bread, 
a scrap ox fragment, present an interesting instance of a change 
of meaning. Bribery, in Old English, meant not secret corrup- 
tion, but theft, rapine, open violence, and very often ofiicial ex- 
tortion. Thus Julyana Berners, in her treatise of Fysshynge with 
the Angle, in speaking of the injustice and cruelty of robbing 
private fish-ponds and other waters, says : " It is a ryght shame- 
full dede to any nobleman to do that that theuys and brybours 
done." * Lord Berners, in his translation of Froissart, describes 
the captain of a band of the irregular soldiery called ' companions,' 
as the " greatest brybour and robber in all Fraunce," and Pals- 

* Alle othere in battaille 
Ben y-holde brybours, 
Pylours and pyke-harneys. 

Piers Ploughman, 14447. 



Lect. xi.] SPECIAL USES OF WOKDS. 21 7 

grave gives I pull and I pyll as synonyms of I bribe. At that 
dark period, the subject had "no rights which" his rulers "were 
bound to respect." The ministers of civil and ecclesiastical power 
needed not to conceal their rapacity, and they availed themselves 
of the authority belonging to their positions for the purpose of 
undisguised plunder. But when by the light, first of religious, 
and then of what naturally followed, civil liberty, men were able 
to see that it was of the essence of law, that it should bind the 
governors as well as the governed, him who makes, him who ad- 
ministers, and him who serves under it alike, it became necessary 
for official robbery to change its mode of procedure, and mantle 
with the cloak of secrecy the hand that clutched the spoil. But 
though the primitive form of this particular iniquity is gone, the 
thing remains, and the unlawful gains of power, once seized with 
strong hand, or extorted with menacing clenched fist, but now 
craved with open palm, are still bribes. Formerly the official ex- 
tortioner or rapacious dignitary was styled a briber, and he was 
said to bribe when he boldly grasped his prey, but now the 
tempter is the briber, and the timid recipient is the bribed* 

Soldier, from the Latin solidus,f the name of a coin, meant 
originally one who performed military service, not in fulfilment 
of the obligations of the feudal law, but upon contract, and for 
stipulated pay. Soldier, therefore, in its primary signification, is 
identical with hireling or mercenary. But the regular profession 

* Cranmer, Instruction into Christian Religion, Sermon VII. , uses bribe in 
the modern sense : "And the iudge himself e is a thefe before God, when he 
for brybes or any corrupcion doth wittingly and wyllingly give wrong iudge- 
ment." But, in Sermon X., he has this passage : " These rauenynge woulfes, 
that be euer thrystynge after other mennes goodes * * * less the f auoure 
both of God and man, and ar called of euery man extorcioners, brybers, pollers 
and piellers, deuourers of widowes houses." 

And in the Instruction of Prayer, on the Fourth Petition, "But they that 
delyght in superfluitie of gorgyous apparel and deynty fare * * * commenly 
do deceaue the nedye, brybe, and pyle from them." 

f Etymologists of the Celtic school affirm that s o 1 d a t is from the Celtic 
souldar, a feudal vassal bound to military service, and from s o 1 d a t they 
derive the French s o 1 d e and solder, and the German Sold, besolden; 
that is, they find the origin of a group of words to every one of which the notion 
of pay is fundamental, in a word the proper sense of which excludes that no- 
tion, for the very essence of feudal obligation is that it requires service without 
pay. Lucus & non lucendo. 
10 



218 SPECIAL USES OF WORDS. [Lect. xi. 

of arms is held to be favorable to the development of those gen- 
erous and heroic traits of character which, more than any of the 
gentler virtues, have in all ages excited the admiration of men. 
Hence, since standing armies, composed of troops who serve for 
pay, have afforded to military men the means of a systematic pro- 
fessional training, including the regular cultivation of the traits 
in question, we habitually ascribe to the soldier qualities precisely 
the reverse of those which we connect with the terms hireling and 
mercenary, and though the words are the etymological equivalents 
of each other, soldier has become a peculiarly honorable designa- 
tion, while hireling and mercenary are employed only in an 
offensive sense. 

We may find in the cognate languages examples of changes of 
meaning dependent upon the same principles as these illustra- 
tions. Among the articles of merchandise supplied to the popu- 
lation of Denmark and Norway by the Hanse towns, during the 
commercial monopoly they so long enjoyed, one of the most im- 
portant was common pepper, and the clerks in the Hanse trading 
factories in the Scandinavian seaports were popularly called 
Pebersvende, j?epper-hoys. By the general regulations of 
the Hanse towns, these clerks were obliged to remain unmarried, 
and hence Pebersvend, pepper-boy, became, and still is, the 
regular Danish word for single-man, or old bachelor. 

The herring-fishery was long the most lucrative branch of the 
maritime industry of Holland, and was the means by which a 
large number of the inhabitants of that country acquired their 
livelihood. JSTering,=German Nahrung, in Dutch signi- 
fies properly nourishment, sustenance, and, figuratively, the busi- 
ness or occupation by which men earn their bread. The import- 
ance of the pursuit of which we have just spoken made it em- 
phatically the n e r i n g , or vocation of the Dutch seamen, and 
ter nering varen means to go on a fishing-cruise. The 
common English and American designation of bookselling and 
booksellers as the trade is a similar instance. 

The Greek ixvarrfpiov meant originally the secret doctrines 
and ceremonies connected with the worship of particular divini- 
ties. In the Middle Ages, the most difficult and delicate processes 
of many of the mechanical arts were kept religiously secret, and 
hence in all the countries of Europe those arts were themselves 



Lect. xi.] EXHAUSTION" OF WORDS. 219 

called mysteries, as mechanical trades still are in the dialect of 
the English law. Thus, when a boy is apprenticed to a tanner or 
a shoe-maker, the legal instrument, or indenture, by which he is 
bound, stipulates that he shall be taught the art and mystery of 
tanning or shoe-making. Afterwards, mystery came to designate, 
in common speech, any regular occupation, so that a man's mys- 
tery was his trade, his employment, the profession by which he 
earned his bread,* and as men are most obviously classed and 
characterized by their habitual occupations, the question which so 
often occurs in old English writers, ' What mister wight is that % 9 
means, what is that man's employment, and, consequently, condi- 
tion in lif e ? What manner of man is he ? In French, the word 
has had a different history. From mysterium, in the sense 
of a trade or art, comes metier, of the same signification, and 
because, in certain provinces, the art of weaving was the most im- 
portant and gainful of the mechanic arts, first weaving, and then 
the implement by which it is exercised, received by way of excel- 
lence the name metier, which now signifies a loom.f 

* In youthe he lerned hadde a good mistere, 
He was a wel good wright, a carpentere. 

Prol. to Canterbury Tales. 

f This etymology seems to me more probable than the usual one, which de- 
rives mister and metier from the Latin ministerium, because the n in 
ministerium is radical, and in such combinations is generally, though in- 
deed not universally, retained in French and English derivatives. The earliest 
instance I have met with of the use of this word in English, (or semi-Saxon,) 
is in the extracts from the Rule of Nuns in the Reliquae Antiquae, vol. II. , p. 2 : 
"Marthe meostor is to fede povre," where indeed the sense favors the deriva 
tion from ministerium. The old French and English maistrie, craft, art, 
science, probably from the Latin magister (magisterium) and mister, 
resemble each other in use and meaning, and the three words, mister, maistrie, 
and mystery are so nearly alike in form, that they might readily be confounded 
in signification. The Spanish menester, need or necessity, is doubtless 
from ministerium, and the English mister, used in that sense, must prob- 
ably be referred to the same source, but the signification of necessity is so re- 
mote from that of occupation, that it seems more reasonable to adopt a separate 
etymology for each. Halliwell even derives mistery or mystery in the sense of 
an occupation, from mister. The Portuguese mestre has been adopted into 
Hindostanee in the form mistri, in the sense of a foreman, especially as applied 
to a mason or bricklayer ; and in the business accounts of European overseers 
in India it has passed into mystery. 

Few words have undergone greater and more varied changes of meaning 
than the Latin species. Species is derived from s p e c i o , an old verb 



220 COLLOQUIAL COKBUPTIONS. [Lect. xl 

I have alluded to the remarkable fact, that words, like material 
substances, are changed, worn-out, exhausted of their meaning, 
and at last rendered quite unserviceable, by long use. To this 
law, both their form and their signification are subject. In here 
speaking of form, I do not refer to grammatical changes of end- 
ing and inflections, which will be the subject of future lectures, 
and which are in a great measure due to other causes, but to 
modifications produced by that negligence of treatment which is 
the result of close familiarity with any object.* Examples of 
this are the abbreviated and otherwise mutilated pet names, by 
which servants, children, and intimate associates are called. It 
may be laid down as a general rule, that words most frequently 
employed are hastily and carelessly pronounced, and that, in in- 
flected languages, they are, with very few exceptions, irregular in 
form. In this way often grows up a dictinction between the 
written and the spoken languages, which, in some cases, is carried 

signifying, I see. Species, then, is that which is seen, the visible form of 
an object, " havynge sothli the spice [or licnesse] of pite, forsothe denyinge the 
vertu of it." (WycL, 2. Tim. iii. 5.) But things are known and distinguished 
most frequently by their visible forms, and related things have like forms. 
Hence, among other senses, species acquired that of kind, or natural class, 
which is its present most usual import. It was then popularly applied to desig- 
nate the different kinds or classes of merchandise, and as the drugs, perfumes, 
and condiments of the East were the most important articles of merchan- 
dise, they were called, par excellence, species, spezie in Italian, epices 
in French, spices in English, and an apothecary is still termed speziale in 
Italy, his shop a spezieria, his drugs spezierie. Again, species is 
the visible form of a thing, as distinguished from that which symbolically, or 
conventionally, represents it, and hence, when notes of governments, banks, or 
individuals were brought into use as representatives of money, payments in 
actual coin were said to be payments in specie, in contradistinction from 
payments in the conventional equivalent of money, and specie now means gold 
and silver coin. 

It is curious that when spezie, the common term for different kinds of 
merchandise, was restricted in Italy to drugs and spices, as the most important 
of them, genereorgenero (Latin g e n u s), a group or assemblage of species, 
took its place as a general designation of vendible wares, and is now used for 
goods, as generi coloniali, colonial, or as we say, West India goods. 

* The many changes of form which the Latin senior, elder, has undergone, 
are no doubt due to this negligence. Neapolitan, Si, (query, Arabic Sidi . ? ) ; 
Genoese, Scio ; Tuscan, Ser; N. Italy, Onor, Sior ; French, Seigneur, Sieur, 
Sire ; English, Sire, sir ; Catalan, En, n', fern, na. See also the various forms 
in Italian of the Latin vinwn (Gr. olvog), vino, vin, vi, ino, i. 



Lect. xi.] COLLOQUIAL CORRUPTIONS. 221 

so far that the formal rules of pronunciation observed by the best 
speakers in conversation, and in reading or in set discourse, are so 
different as almost to amount to a difference of dialect, and while 
he who reads as he speaks would shock by the vulgarity, another, 
who speaks as he reads, would scarcely less offend the hearer by 
the pedantic formality of his enunciation. In English, a distinc- 
tion of this sort is not obligatory, but tolerated, and it is very com- 
monly practised, though, among educated persons, not to such an 
extent as in some of the Continental languages. Thus, don't is 
very commonly used for do not, and, by careless speakers, even 
for does not; Pll and you'll, Pd and you'd, for I will, you will, 
I would and you would ; isn't, aren't, haven't, and won't, for is 
not, are not, have not, and will not. Indeed, we too often hear, 
in the conversation of persons from whom we have a right to ex- 
pect better things, such sad distortions of words as haint and aint, 
and I am sorry to say that Charles Lamb has even committed this 
last transgression in writing, in one of his f amiliar letters to Cole- 
ridge. So long as departures from grammatical propriety of 
speech are merely allowable colloquialisms, not recognized changes 
in the normal form of words, they come rather within the juris- 
diction of social authority ; they are questions of manner, like the 
set phrases of complimentary salutation, and not entitled to con- 
sideration as exemplifications of the law of progress and revolu- 
tion to which all human language is subject. Such licenses of 
speech rest on no ascertainable principle. I shall, therefore, not 
inquire into their essential linguistic character, or the extent to 
which they may be indulged in without infringing the laws of 
good taste, and I will dismiss them with the simple remark that 
they are substantially corruptions of language, and therefore to 
be employed as sparingly as possible. 

The changes of signification which words undergo, in all lan- 
guages, from mere exhaustion by use, form a far more extensive 
and important subject. ".Names and words," says Robertson, 
"soon lose their meaning. In the process of years and centuries, 
the meaning dies off them, like the sunlight from the hills. The 
hills are there, the color is gone." It is melancholy to reflect that 
such changes in the signification of words are almost always for 
the worse. A word unfamiliar and dignified in one century, be- 
comes common and indifferent in the next, trivial and contempt- 



222 MOEAL COKKUPTKXN" OF WOEDS. [Lect. XI. 

ible in a third,* and this degradation of meaning is too often con- 
nected with a moral decline in the people, if it does not flow from 
it. " That decay in the meaning of words," observes the same 
admirable sermonizer whom I have just quoted, " that lowering 
of the standard of the ideas for which they stand, is a certain 
mark [of the decay of elevated national feeling]. The debase- 
ment of a language is a sure mark of the debasement of a nation ; 
the insincerity of a language of the insincerity of a nation ; for a 
time comes when words no longer stand for things ; when names 
are given for the sake of a euphonious sound ; and when titles 
are but the epithets of an unmeaning courtesy." 

The thorough investigation of the principles of these changes 
would require more of psychological discussion, and a more ab- 
struse vein of argument, than can fitly find place in a series of 
unmethodical and unscientific discourses, and I shall content my- 
self with offering a couple of familiar illustrations, which may of 
themselves suggest important principles of language in its relation 
to ethics, without attempting to expound them. Let us take the 
adjective respectable. Respectable was originally — and in French, 
to the honor of that nation, still is — a term of high commenda- 
tion, and was scarcely inferior in force, though not precisely 
equivalent in signification, to admirable in our present use of that 
word. At a later period it implied an inferior degree of worth, 
little above mediocrity, and now, with reference to intellect and 
morality, it has come to mean barely not contemptible, while, 
popularly, it is applied to every man whose pecuniary means raise 
him above the necessity of manual drudgery. Thus, in a cele- 
brated criminal trial in England, when a witness was asked why 
he applied the epithet to a person of whom he had spoken as a 
"respectable man," he said it was because he kept a horse and 

W- 

* That a word does sometimes grow, instead of decline, in dignity, must be 
inferred from Gray's criticism of a line in Beattie's Minstrel : " The pomp of 
groves, the garniture of fields." Gray says of the whole stanza: "This is 
true poetry ; it is inspiration ; only there is one blemish ; the word garniture 
suggesting an idea of dress, and, what is worse, of French dress." For some 
reason or other, perhaps from the very use made of it here by the poet, no 
such trivial association is now connected with this word. 

Chi sa che molte di queste odierne bassezze un di non siano stelle. See Davan- 
zati's Letters, pp. 17, 18, 19. 



Lect. xi ] THE WOED GENTLEMAN. 223 

So the much abused term gentleman. This word originally 
meant, and still does in the French from which we borrowed it, 
hot, as Webster supposes, a gentle or genteel man, but a man 
born of a noble family, or gens, as it was called in Latin. 
Persons of this rank usually possessed means to maintain an out- 
ward show of superior elegance, and leisure to cultivate the graces 
of social life, so that in general they were distinguished above the 
laboring classes by a more prepossessing exterior, greater refine- 
ment of manners, and a more tasteful dress. As their wealth 
and legal privileges diminished with the increasing power and 
affluence of the citizens of the trading towns, there was a gradual 
approximation, in both social position and civil rights, between 
the poorer gentlemen and the richer burgesses, until at last they 
were distinguished by nothing but family names, as indicative 
of higher or lower origin. The term gentleman was now ap- 
plied, indiscriminately, to all persons who kept up the state and 
observed the social forms which had once been the exclusive 
characteristics of elevated rank. Theoretically, elegance of man- 
ner and attainment in the liberal arts should imply refinement of 
taste, generosity of spirit, nobleness of character, and these were 
regarded as the moral attributes specially belonging to those pos- 
sessed of the outward tokens by which the rank was recognized. 
The advancement of democratic principles in England and Amer- 
ica has made rapid progress in abolishing artificial distinctions of 
all sorts. Every man claims for himself, and popular society 
allows to him, the right of selecting his own position, and conse- 
quently in those countries every man of decent exterior and be- 
havior assumes to be a gentleman in manners and in character, 
and in the ordinary language of life is both addressed and de- 
scribed as such. 

It is much to the credit of England, that popular opinion in a 
remote age attached higher importance to the moral than to the 
material possessions of the gentleman, and accordingly we find 
that as early as the reign of Edward III., the word had already 
acquired the meaning we now give it, when we apply to it the 
best and highest sense of which it is susceptible. In Chaucer's 
Romaunt of the Rose there occurs a passage well illustrating this 
feeling, and it is worth remarking that the original Roman de la 
Rose, of which Chaucer's Romaunt is an admirable but improved 



224 THE WOED GENTLEMAN. [Lect. XI. 

translation, contains no hint of the generous and noble sentiments 
expressed by the English poet, respecting the superiority of moral 
worth and the social virtues over ancestral rank. 

But understand in thine entent 
That this is not mine entendement, 
To clepe no wight in no ages 
Onely gentle for his linages ; 
But who so is vertuous 
And in his port not outrageous, 
When such one thou seest thee bef orne, 
Though he be not gentle borne, 
Thou maiest well saine this in soth 
That he is gentle, because he doth 
As longeth to a gentleman. 

To villaine speech in no degree* 
Let never thy lippe unbounden bee : 
For I nought hold him, in good faith, 
Curteis, that f oule wordes saith ; 
And all women serve and preise, 
And to thy power hir honour reise, 
And if that any mis-sayere 
Despise women, that thou maist here, 
Blame him, and bid him hold him still. 

Maintaine thy self e after thy rent, 
Of robe and eke of garment, 
For many sithe, faire clothing 
A man amendeth in much thing. 
Of shoone and bootes, new and faire, 
Looke at the least you have a paire, 
And that they sit so f etously, 
That these rude may utterly 
Marvaile, sith that they sit so plaine, 
How they come on or off againe. 
"Weare streight gloves, with aumere 
Of silke : and alway with good chere 
Thou yeve, if thou have richesse, 
And if thou have nought, spend the lesse. 

The wanton abuse of words by writers in the department of 
popular imaginative literature has been productive of very serious 

* Villano non e" chi in villa st& 
Ma villan' e chi villanie fa\ 

Florio, Giard. di Ricreat, 1591, p. 216. 
To the same purpose is the English proverb : Handsome is that handsome 



Lect. xi.] WANTON" ABUSE OF WOEDS. 225 

injury in language and in ethics. The light ironical tone of per- 
siflage, in which certain eminent authors of this class habitually in- 
dulge, has debased our national speech, and proved more demoral- 
izing in its tendency than the open attacks of some of them upon 
Christianity, its ministers, and its professors, or the fatuity with 
which others endow all their virtuous characters, and the vice, 
selfishness, and corruption which they ascribe to all their person- 
ages whom they do not make idiots. By such writers, a black- 
guardly boy is generally spoken of as a " promising young gen- 
tleman "; an abandoned villain or a successful swindler, as a " re- 
spectable personage "; a vulgar and ignorant woman, as a " grace- 
ful and accomplished lady." Had these authors contented them- 
selves with pillorying the pet vulgarisms of the magazine and the 
newspaper, they would have rendered a great service to literature 
and to morals, but when the only words we possess to designate 
the personifications of honor, virtue, manhood, grace, generosity, 
and truth, are systematically applied to all that is contemptible 
and all that is corrupt, there is no little danger that these high 
qualities will, in popular estimation, share in the debasement to 
which their proper appellations are subjected. It is difficult to 
suppose that the authors of works evincing great knowledge of 
the world, who habitually profane the name of every attribute 
that men have held great and reverend, really believe in the ex- 
istence of such attributes. A man who accustoms himself to 
speak of a low-minded and grovelling person as a gentleman, 
either has no just conception of the character which this word 
professes to describe, or does not believe in the possibility of it ; 
and the admiring readers of such a writer will end by adopting 
his incredulity, and renouncing the effort to develop and culti- 
vate qualities, which, in every virtuous community, have formed 
the highest objects of a noble social ambition. 

10* 



LECTTTKE XII 



THE VOCABULAET OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



The advocates of the theory which regards language as wholly 
arbitrary, artificial, and conventional, as a thing of human inven- 
tion, not of divine origin or of spontaneous growth, may find in 
its mutability a specious, though by no means a conclusive, argu- 
ment in support of that doctrine. For things organic, products 
of the laws of nature, tend altogether to the repetition of their 
typical forms. If changed at all in sensible characteristics, the 
process of their transformation is extremely slow, and they ex- 
hibit a perpetual inclination to revert to the primitive type, as 
often as the disturbing or modifying influences are withdrawn, 
or even weakened in their action. Human contrivances, institu- 
tions, systems, on the contrary, are subject to incessant change, 
nor have they any inherent tendency to return to the original 
form, but as they recede from the starting-point, they continu- 
ally diverge more and more widely from the initial direction. 
The physical characteristics of animal races, and of the sponta- 
neous vegetable products of the soil, are constant, so long as they 
remain unmixed in descent, and subject to the same climatic and 
nutritive influences. But in the progress of centuries, man's 
laws, his institutions and modes of life, all, in short, that is es- 
sentially of his invention or voluntary adoption, and especially 
his language,* undergo such radical revolutions that little appar- 
ently remains to attest his relationship to his remote progenitors. 

* One of the most important changes in any language historically known, is 
that by which English rid itself of grammatical gender, and was thus trans- 
ferred to a new class not before known in European philology. This freedom 
from grammatical gender is now perhaps its most striking characteristic. 
(226) 



Lect. xn.] M CHANGES OF LANGUAGE. 227 

But the law of adherence and return to original type, if not 
confined to lower organisms, is greatly restricted in its applica- 
tion to more elevated races and forms. Man himself, the most 
exalted of earthly existences, seems almost wholly exempt from 
its operation, and the varieties of his external structure, once es- 
tablished, perpetuate themselves with little discoverable inclina- 
tion to revert to any known common and primitive model of the 
species. Man's language is higher than himself, more spiritual, 
more ethereal, and still less subject than his physical frame to the 
jurisdiction of the laws of material nature. We have therefore 
no right to expect to find speech returning to primeval unity, 
until the realization of those dreams which predict the complete 
subjugation of material nature, the consequent equalization, or at 
least compensation, of her gifts to different portions of the earth's 
surface, the perfectibility of man, and his union in one great uni- 
versal commonwealth. There are, however, well-ascertained facts 
which seem to show that words, with all their mutability, are 
still subject to a law of reversion like other products of material 
life, and if the distinction which many grammarians make be- 
tween technically modem and ancient languages is well founded, 
and if the common tendencies ascribed to the former are inherent 
and not accidental, we must refer them to the operation of a prin- 
ciple as general and as imperative as that by which the double- 
flowers of our gardens are brought back to their original sim- 
plicity of structure, by neglect and self -propagation.* But it is 
as yet too early to pronounce upon the ultimate form of language, 
and we are hardly better able to foresee what centuries may bring 
forth in the character of speech, than to prophesy what configu- 
ration of surface and what forms of animal fife will mark our 
earth in future geological periods. Modes of verbal modifica- 
tion, mutations of form, indeed, we can readily trace back so far 
as written memorials exist, and the course of change is sometimes 
so constant for a certain period, that we can predict, with some 
confidence, what phase a given living language will next present. 
These observations, however, respect more particularly the syntax, 
the inflections, the proportions of native and foreign roots, and 
other general characteristics of speech. Special changes of vo- 

* See Lecture xvii. 



228 CHANGES OF LANGUAGE. t [Lect. xil. 

cabulary can frequently be explained after they have once hap- 
pened, bnt very seldom foretold, and words sometimes disappear 
altogether and are lost forever, or, like some stars, suddenly rise 
again to view, and resume their old place in both literature and 
the colloquial dialect, without any discoverable cause for either 
their occultation or their emergence. The only portion of the 
English vocabulary that can be said to be altogether stable consists 
of those Saxon words which describe the arts and modes of life 
common to all ages and countries, the specific names of natural 
products whose character is unchanging, and of their parts and 
members, and those also of the natural wants and universal pas- 
sions of man. The nomenclature of the more refined arts and 
professions, and, in general, the alien words which have entered 
into the language of literature and polished society, are, on the 
other hand, subject, not indeed like native words to a law of de- 
velopment and growth, but to perpetual change, frequent rise 
and decay. 

I alluded on a former occasion to the conservative influence of 
our great writers, and especially of the standard translation of the 
Bible. The dialect of that translation belongs to an earlier phase 
of the language, and it far more resembles the English of the 
century preceding than that of its own contemporary literature. 
Nevertheless, of the somewhat fewer than six thousand words it 
contains, scarcely two hundred are now in any sense obsolete or 
substantially altered in meaning, whereas most of the new or un- . 
familiar words which it sanctioned have fairly established them- 
selves in our general vocabulary, in spite of the attacks which 
have been so often made and repeated against them. It would, 
however, not be fair to compare the language of the English. Bi- 
ble with the dialect of the present day by the individual words 
alone. The real difference is not wholly in single words, not 
even in the meaning of them separately considered, but also in 
combinations of words, phraseological expressions, idioms, or 
rather idiotisms. The translators of 1611 borrowed many of 
these from older versions, whose dialect was going out of use, 
and they now constitute the portion of the authorized Bible, 
which must be regarded as obsolescent. Take, for instance, the 
expression " much people." This was once grammatically correct, 
for the following reasons : People and/tf^, (as well as the Saxon 



Lect. xii.] PERMANENCY OF WORDS. 229 

equivalent of the latter, folc,) in the singular form, usually 
meant, in Old-English, a political state, or an ethnologically rela- 
ted body of men, considered as a unit, in short a nation, and both 
people and folk took the plural form when used in a plural sense, 
just as nation now does. Nation is indeed found in the Wycliffite 
versions, but it rarely occurs, andpuple or folk in the singular, 
puplis dcnAfolkis in the plural, are generally used where we now 
employ nations. In Tyndale's time, nation had come into more 
general use, while people was losing its older signification, and 
was seldom employed in a plural sense, still more rarely in a plu- 
ral form. In the translation of 1611, I believe the plural is 
found but twice, both instances of its occurrence being in the 
Revelation. Many is essentially plural, and there is a syntactical 
solecism in applying it to a noun which itself does not admit of a 
plural. While therefore the word was hovering between the 
sense of nation, which may be multiplied, and that of an aggrega- 
tion of persons, which may be divided, it was natural, and at the 
same time syntactically right, to say much, rather than many, 
people. King James's translators, in this as in many other points, 
employed the language of the preceding century, not of their 
own ; for in the secular literature of their time people had settled 
down into its present signification, and conformed to modern 
grammatical usage. 

An examination of the vocabulary of Shakespeare will show 
that out of the fifteen thousand words which compose it, not more 
than about five or six. hundred have gone out of currency or 
changed their meaning, and of these, some, no doubt, are mis- 
prints, some, borrowed from obscure provincial dialects, and some, 
words for which there is no other authority, and which proba- 
bly never were recognized as English. 

In the poetical works of Milton, who employs about eight 
thousand words, there are not more than one hundred which are 
not as familiar at this day, as in that of the poet himself. In fact, 
scarcely any thing of Milton's poetic diction has become obsolete, 
except some un-English words and phrases of his own coinage, and 
which failed to gain admittance at all. On the other hand, the 
less celebrated authors of the same period, including Milton him- 
self as a prose writer, employ, not hundreds, but thousands of 
words, utterly unknown to all save the few who occupy them- 



230 OBSOLETE WOKDS. [Lect. xn. 

selves with, the study of the earlier literature of England. One 
might almost say that the little volume of Bacon's Essays alone 
contains as large a number of words and phrases no longer em- 
ployed in our language, as the whole of Milton's poetical works.* 
English, composed as it is of inharmonious and jarring elements, 
is, more than any other important tongue, exposed to jjerpetual 
change from the fermentation of its yet unassimilated ingredients, 
and it therefore has always needed, and still needs, more powerful 
securities and bulwarks against incessant revolution than other 
languages of less heterogeneous composition. The three great liter- 
ary monuments, the English Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, fixed 
the syntax of the sacred and the secular dialects in the forms which 
they had already taken, and perpetuated so much of the vocabu- 
lary as entered into their composition. It is true there are Con- 
tinental authors of the seventeenth century, Pascal for instance, 
whose style and diction are as far from being antiquated as those 
of the English classics I have mentioned. Doubtless the great liter- 
ary merits of Pascal, and the profound interest of the subjects he 
discusses, did much to give fixedness and stability to the dialect 
which serves as the vehicle of his keen satire and powerful reason- 
ing, but we cannot ascribe to him so great a conservative influ- 
ence as to the master-pieces of English literature, because, though 
French shares in the general causes of linguistic change which are 
common to all Christendom, it has not the same special tenden- 

* Notwithstanding the multitude of new words and recent corruptions which 
we have engrafted upon the English tongue, I am inclined to believe that the 
general dialect of intelligent persons in this country is more archaic than that 
of the corresponding classes in England ; and I ascribe this to the universal 
habit of reading, and especially to the familiarity of the Puritans with the 
English Scriptures. Certainly, no American editor of Bacon's Essays would 
think it necessary, or even respectful to the understanding of his readers, to 
inform them, as Archbishop Whately (at the suggestion of a friend) has done, 
that vocation means calling, state of life, and duties of the embraced profession ; 
diverse, different ; poesy, poetry ; contrariwise, on the contrary ; whit, the least 
degree, the smallest particle ; fume, exhalation ; straighticays, immediately; ere, 
before ; to handle a subject, to treat of, or discuss it ; to marvel, to wonder at. 

It would be easy to make out an interesting list of obsolete phrases, for the 
disuse of which it would be difficult to account. For instance, we still say, 
catch a cold, but no one in England or America would now say, catch a heat, 
though in the time of Holinshed the latter phrase was equally good English 
with the former. 



Lect. xil] CHANGES IN YOCABULAEY. 231 

cies to fluctuation as our more composite speech. Such, in fact, 
was the unstable character of English during the century which 
preceded Shakespeare, that, but for the influence of the Reforma- 
tion and of the three great lodestars we have been considering, it 
would probably have become, before our time, rather Romance 
than Gothic in its vocabulary, as well as much less Saxon in its 
syntax. 

The operation of the numerous causes which contribute to the 
introduction of new words into a given language, is generally 
sufficiently palpable. Wherever a new expression is suited to per- 
form the office and take the place of an older one, the disappear- 
ance of the latter is easily accounted for. But there are numer- 
ous instances in the history of speech, where not single words only, 
but whole classes of them, suddenly drop out of the vocabulary 
and are heard no more. When an event of this sort is connected 
with changes in the processes by which particular ends are accom- 
plished, the old words are commonly supplied by new, so that the 
whole number is kept substantially good ; but when, on the other 
hand, particular arts cease altogether to be practised, or pass out 
of the domestic circle, where the whole household more or less 
takes part in them, into the hands of large mechanical establish- 
ments, and become associate and organized, not individual occupa- 
tions, their nomenclature perishes with them, or is restricted to 
the comparatively narrow circles which occupy themselves exclu- 
sively in their pursuit. As an example of one of these cases, that, 
namely, where the art and its vocabulary become obsolete together, 
I may mention the employment of archery, in war, in the chase, 
or as a healthful and agreeable recreation. If you look into 
Ascham's Toxophilus, published in Queen Elizabeth's time, or 
into any old English treatise on the Military Art, you will find 
numerous technical terms belonging to the use of the bow, which 
three hundred years ago were as familiar to every man and boy 
as lock, stock, and barrel are to us, but which have now completely 
vanished out of the common language of life, except the few of 
them that have been retained in proverbs and poetic similes. 
There were bows of a great variety of form and materials, and the 
manufacture of them was a very important trade by itself. The 
family names Bowyer and Archer, the latter from the French 
a r c , a bow, are derived from the occupations of persons devoted 



232 LOSS OF WORDS. [Lect. xn. 

to the making or the use of that weapon.* The processes em- 
ployed in the preparation of the wood by seasoning or otherwise, 
and in the shaping and decoration of the bow, were very numer- 
ous, and each had its appropriate name. The manufacture of 
arrows was a different trade. The arrow was as diversified in 
form and material as the bow, and the arrow-makers, or fletchers 
as they were called, from the French f 1 e c h e , an arrow ^ (whence 
also the family name Fletcher,) had as full a vocabulary as the 
bowyers. Then came the manufacture of bow-strings, of bow- 
cases and quivers, of bracers for the protection of the left arm from 
the grazing of the string, of shooting-gloves, and other inferior 
branches of art belonging to the use of the bow, all distinct trades, 
and each with its distinct, separate stock of technical words. Now, 
as I have said before, almost the whole of this vocabulary is 
utterly gone out of our common speech, and the implement, to 
the construction and employment of which it belonged, having 
become disused altogether, no new words have arisen to take the 
place of those which have grown obsolete. Fire-arms, indeed, 
have introduced a totally different set of expressions, but the bow 
and the musket have so little in common, in form or use, that the 
word aim is almost the only one that could be applied to both. 
The technical expressions connected with the musket suggest quite 
other ideas than those belonging to the dialect of archery '; and, 
therefore, the new phrasas cannot be considered as the equivalents, 
or as occupying the place of the old. The construction of the 
musket is more difficult than that of the bow, and requires a longer 
apprenticeship, a much greater stock of tools and mechanical con- 
trivances, and a larger capital for carrying it on ; the demand for 
this weapon is much less, because one gun will outlast many bows, 
and for all these reasons, both the business of the gunsmith, which 
has become a manufacture, not a handicraft, and its terms of art, 
are less familiar to the people than were those of the bowyer and 
the fletcher. Although, therefore, the musket has brought with 
it many new words, and they are used in the main under the same 
circumstances as the dialect of archery, yet so far as the copious- 
ness of popular English is concerned, the substitution of the one 



* I find that historical evidence favors the derivation of Bowyer from the 
French bouvier. 



LEcr. xn.] LOSS OF WOKDS. 233 

weapon for the other has been attended not only with a great 
change, but with a considerable loss, in the daily speech of the 
numerous class which formerly drew the bow but now handle the 
musket. 

Again, the improvements in fire-arms and their appurtenances, 
since their first introduction, have involved almost as great 
changes of nomenclature as those which followed their substitu- 
tion for the bow. The forms and mode of employment of field 
and siege artillery have been almost completely revolutionized, and 
the technical terms belonging to them are wholly different from 
what they were three hundred years ago. The musket of the six- 
teenth century and the improved rifle of the nineteenth differ very 
widely in their details. In fact, they have little in common but 
their most general features, and the professional phraseologies of 
the hackbuteer of Queen Elizabeth's time, and the sharp-shooter 
of Queen Victoria's, resemble each other as little as their 
weapons. 

A large class of words belonging to arts very familiar to the 
last generation in this country, but now no longer practised in 
domestic life, has become virtually obsolete within the memory 
of some who hear me. Let us take the vocabulary of American 
rural industry, and consider the changes which the advance of 
mechanical art, and the increased use of cotton, have produced 
within thirty or forty years in the household conversations upon 
the single subject of family clothing. At the period to which I 
refer, the wool and the flax, which formed the raw material of 
the common dress of the country, as well as of the tissues employed 
for numerous other purposes in domestic life, were produced upon 
the homestead. They not only underwent the several operations 
required to fit them for the dye-pot, the wheel, and the loom, but 
they were spun, woven, and often colored, beneath the family roof. 
Connected with all this industry there was an extensive nomen- 
clature. First came the technicalities belonging to the growing 
of flax, including the preparation of the ground and the seed ; 
then the sowing, harvesting, rotting, breaking, and swingling 
the plant. These were outdoor labors. Then followed the 
household toils, the hetchelling, spinning, reeling, spooling, 
weaving, and dyeing or bleaching of the cloth. Each of these 
processes had its appropriate mechanical implements, some of 



234 LOSS OF WOKDS. [Lect. xn. 

them complicated in their construction, and every step of the 
whole succession of labors, every tool and machine, and each of 
its parts, had its appropriate name. The manufacture of wool, 
again, had its vocabulary, in some things coincident with, but in 
many different from, that employed with relation to flax ; so that 
the supply of linen and woollen cloth for domestic purposes required 
the use of certainly not less than two or three hundred technical 
words, all of which were perfectly intelligible to every inhabitant 
of the country districts. The labors of which I speak extended 
through the whole year, and formed the most important of the 
industrial functions which the mistress of the family participated 
in and directed, and consequently were prominent and constant 
subjects of family conversation. Now, the every-day vocabulary 
of common colloquial life does not, at any one period, comprise 
more than three or four thousand words, and though some of the 
technical terms I have mentioned are still currently used in other 
applications, yet, for the most part, the nomenclature of this great 
branch of rural industry has perished with the industry itself. I 
think it safe to say, that the substitution of cotton for linen, and 
the supply of tissues by large manufacturing establishments in- 
stead of by domestic labor, have alone driven out of use seven or 
eight per cent, of the words which formed the staple of household 
conversation in the agricultural districts of the Northern States. 
Similar changes have taken place, though not so recently, in the 
domestic dialect of England, and indeed of the principal Conti- 
nental countries. The domestic manufacture of cloths, linens es- 
pecially, was by no means confined to the poor in a somewhat 
earlier stage of European society, and the words belonging to 
this branch of industry formed almost as conspicuous a part of 
the vocabulary of exalted, as of humble life. I may mention, as 
a proof of this, that in different languages the names of different 
implements employed in spinning have been adopted in very ele- 
vated applications, as designations of the female sex, which seems 
to have appropriated that art to itself in all times and countries. 
Thus, not to speak of the phraseology of more primitive ages, in 
modern Danish, the male and female lines of descent and inheri- 
tance, or as we say, the father's side and the mother's side, are 
called respectively the sword-side and the spinning or spindle- 
side ; and in France, the Salic law, which excludes women from 



Lect. xn.] LOSS OF WORDS. 235 

the inheritance of the throne, is popularly expressed by the 
proverb that, " The crown does not descend to the distaff." * 

The words that have thus perished have left no representatives 
behind them, for the time and thought once employed in these 
humble labors are now devoted to occupations in no wise con- 
nected with domestic manufactures, occupations which have 
brought a new and wholly unrelated stock of words with them. 
Music, books, monthly and weekly periodicals, journeys so much 
facilitated by the increase of railroads and steamboats, now fill up 
many hours formerly laboriously occupied with the cares of house- 
hold life, and each of these has contributed its share of new words 
to enlarge and to enrich the sphere of thought, and the range of 
vocabulary belonging to the productive classes. 

Translations from foreign literatures have introduced great 
numbers of Continental and new words into English. All na- 
tions have not only their proper tongues, but their characteristic 
ideas, thoughts, tastes, sensibilities, and the vocabulary adapted to 
the embodiment of these fails to find equivalents in the languages 
of other peoples. Hence a translator is not unfrequently obliged 
either to borrow the foreign word itself, or to frame, by compo- 
sition or derivation, another more in accordance with native mod- 
els, in order to express to his readers an intellectual conception, a 
taste or an antipathy, new not only to their speech, but to their 
mental and moral natures. 

An incident which excites the surprise, or appeals to the 
sympathies, of a whole people will often give a very general and 
permanent currency to a new word, or an expression not before 
in familiar use. Take for example the word coincidence. The 
verb coincide and its derivative noun are of rather recent intro- 
duction into the language. They are not found in Minshew, and 
they occur neither in Shakespeare nor in Milton, though they may 
perhaps have been employed by scientific writers of as early a 
date. They belong to the language of mathematics, and were 
originally applied to points or lines. Thus, if one mathematical 
point be superposed upon another, or one straight line be super- 

* Spear-side and spindle-side occur in the will of Alfred as designations of 
the male and female lines. Spinster is still used in English as a legal tech- 
nical word. 



236 INTKODTJCTION OF NEW WORDS. [Lect. xn. 

posed upon another straight line between the same two points, or 
if two lines follow the same course, whatever be its curve, between 
two points, then, in the first case the two points, in the latter two, 
the two lines are said to coincide, and their conformity of position 
is called their coincidence. In like manner, any two events hap- 
pening at the same period, or any two acts or states beginning 
at the same moment, and ending at the same moment, are said to 
coincide in time, and the conjugate noun, coincidence, is employed 
to express the fact that they are contemporaneous. These words 
soon passed into common use, in the same sense, and were applied 
also figuratively to identity of opinion or character in different in- 
dividuals, as well as to many other cases of close similarity or re- 
semblance, but they still belonged rather to the language of books 
and of science than to the daily speech of common life. On the 
Fourth of July, 1826, the semi-centennial jubilee of the declara- 
tion of American Independence, Thomas Jefferson, the author, 
and John Adams, one of the signers of that remarkable manifesto, 
both also ex-Presidents, died, and this concurrence in the decease 
of distinguished men on the anniversary of so critical an epoch in 
their hves and in the history of their country was noticed all over 
the world, but more especially in the United States, as an extra- 
ordinary coincidence. The death of Mr. Monroe, also an ex- 
President, on the Fourth of July a year or two after, gave a new 
impulse to the circulation of the word coincidence, and in this 
country, at least, it at once acquired, and still retains, a far more 
general currency than it had ever possessed before.* 

The progress of natural science and the discussion of questions 
concerning vital propagation and growth, have had no inconsider- 
able influence on the language of the more intelligent among us. 
The theory of Darwin has not only familiarized us with the use 
of the word evolution in endless applications, but it has brought 

* Words to which a sudden prominence is thus given are usually iterated 
and re-iterated usque ad nauseam. Thus, element, perhaps from its frequency, 
in alchemical books and conversation, or from its use in theological discussion 
in connection with the doctrine of the real presence, (elements of the Eucharist, 
a sense not noticed by Johnson,) had become so current, that the clown in 
Twelfth Night objects to it as too common. 

"I will conster to them whence you come: who you are, and what you 
would, are out of my welkin : I might say element; but the word is over- 
worn."— Twelfth Night, Act III. sc. 1. 



Lect. xn.] INTEODTTCTION OF NEW WOEDS. 237 

sucli terms as homogeneity, heterogeneity, etc., which were formerly 
almost entirely confined to the vocabulary of science, into very 
general currency. Develop and development, and the ideas they 
express, are now so common that it is hard to find a page of con- 
temporaneous literature without them ; and their frequent recur- 
rence is one of the many proofs of the extent to which concep- 
tions derived from physical science have entered into the gen- 
eral culture of our times. In a recent report of a committee upon 
the vegetables exhibited at the fair of an agricultural society, I ob- 
serve the award of a premium to the grower of some " remarka- 
bly well-developed squashes." 

The discussions at an important political assemblage, a few years 
since, gave a wide circulation, if not birth, to a new word, the 
convenience of which will secure it a permanent place in the lan- 
guage, and, at last, admission to the vocabulary of at least Ameri- 
can literature. At the Baltimore convention of 1844, which 
nominated Mr. Polk for the Presidency, some excitement was 
produced by alleged attempts to control the action of the conven- 
tion by persons not members of it, through irregular channels, 
and by irregular means. In the debate which arose on this sub- 
ject, a prominent member energetically protested against all inter- 
ference with the business of the meeting by outsiders. The word, 
if not absolutely new, was at least new to most of those who read 
the proceedings of that important convention, and it was now for 
the first time employed in a serious way. Its convenience seemed 
to strike the public mind at once, and as we have no other, and 
can have no better word than this genuine Saxon conxpound to 
express the idea it conveys, it will undoubtedly maintain itself in 
our vocabulary. 

Probably most of the new words in any language grow out of 
the foreign relations of the country where it is spoken, because 
new objects and new conditions of society are more frequently of 
foreign than of strictly domestic origin. The early history of the 
English language is full of exemplifications of this principle, and 
many illustrations of its truth will be found in every treatise upon 
our native speech. Similar circumstances are producing like 
effects at the present day. The American word immigrant, for 
example, as opposed to emigrant, the one used with reference to 
the country to which, the other with reference to that from which 



238 INTKODUCTION OF NEW WORDS. [Lect. xn. 

the migration takes place, is a valuable contribution of this sort 
to the English vocabulary. It did not originate in England, be- 
cause, since the Conquest, there has never been any such influx 
of strangers into that country as to create a necessity for very 
specific designations of them ; but the immense number of Euro- 
peans who have migrated to the United States has given that class 
of inhabitants a great importance, and very naturally suggested the 
expediency of coining a precise term, to express their relations to 
their new country, corresponding to that we already possessed as 
applicable to their relations to their native land. Doubtless in- 
comer would have been a better word, but that was objectionable, 
because it could not have a conjugate of like formation, for out- 
comer would, in some of its uses, involve a contradiction, and be- 
sides, the noun income, to which incomer would regularly corre- 
spond, has a very different signification. Better still would it have 
been to revive the good old English comeling, which was used by 
Robert of Gloucester for the very same purpose as our immigrant, 
and often occurs in the Wycliffite translations where later versions 
have stranger. 

From this same root we have another very expressive word, 
the boldness of whose form — a form that sets at defiance the ordi- 
nary rules of derivation — renders it still more appropriate as a 
designation of a class of independent thinkers, who pride them- 
selves on their hostility to venerable shams and their disregard of 
hoary conventionalities. I mean the commuters. This word has 
not, I believe, been yet received into polite literature, but never- 
theless, repugnant as it is to the laws of English etymology, its 
thorough Saxon descent makes it more acceptable to both tongue 
and ear than such a word as enlightenment, which, as I have said 
before, though much wanted, has been hitherto resisted because 
of its mongrel aspect. 

A list of the new words which have been presented for admis- 
sion to our vocabulary,* including those which have failed of 

* Character, though occurring many times in Shakespeare, does not appear 
to have been very readily or generally accepted, for Wotton, writing at least 
ten years after Shakespeare's death, says : 

' ' Now here then will lie the whole businesse, to set down beforehand certain 
Signatures of Hopefulnesse, or Characters (as I will rather call them, because 
that Word hath gotten already some entertainment among us)." Wotton, A 
Surveigh of Education, p. 321, edition of 1651. 



Lect. xn.] INTRODUCTION OF NEW WORDS. 239 

securing a reception, would be both curious and instructive, be- 
cause it would show the deliberate judgment, or rather the in- 
stinctive sense, of the nation with respect to the principles which 
ought to govern the formation of native, and the naturalization 
of foreign, vocables. The tendency for a long time appears to 
have been to discourage domestic linguistic manufactures, and 
promote the importation of foreign wares. Here, as in public 
economy and finance, the free-trade party is in the ascendant, but 
in spite of the foreign influences to which the rapidly increasing 
intercourse, personal and commercial, between England and the 
European continent gives great weight, and in spite of the Latin- 
izing tendencies of rhymed verse, to which I shall refer hereafter, 
there are unequivocal tokens of a reaction, and I have little doubt 
that the Saxon element will soon recover some of the ground it 
has abandoned in the last four or -&ve centuries. Hitherto, how- 
ever, not much has been done in the way of reviving lost or qui- 
escent Saxon roots, and the fluctuations of the vocabulary have 
been chiefly confined to the Romance ingredient. Latin words, 
like strange guests, are constantly coming late and going early, 
while the native Saxons either steadily maintain their position, 
like old householders, or if they once fall into f orgetfulness, re- 
main long in a state of repose ; but there is now a movement 
among the Seven Sleepers, and the future progress of our speech, 
it may be hoped, will bring back to us many a verbal Rip Yan 
Winkle. 

I have elsewhere spoken of what I have called the "suspended 
animation " of words, as one of the most singular phenomena of 
their history, and English philologists have collected numerous 
instances of this sort, chiefly from the Latin element of English, 
though there are not wanting like cases in proper Saxon words. 
The Saxon adjective reckless (formerly spelled retchless), for ex- 
ample, was in constant use down to the middle of the sixteenth 
century, but when Hooker, writing fifty years later, employed the 
word, it had become so nearly obsolete, that he, or perhaps his 
editor, thought it necessary to explain its meaning in a marginal 
note. It has now been revived, and is perfectly familiar to every 
English-speaking person.* A couple of like instances, though 

* The indiscriminate use of bound, in the sense of ready, destined, deter- 
mined, which has recently become very common in this country, and is per- 



240 SUSPENDED ANIMATION OF WOEDS. [Lect. xii. 

not in Saxon words, occur in a little vocabulary which went 
through at least twelve editions in the seventeenth century, but 
is now so completely forgotten as to be little known except to 
bibliographers. It is entitled, The English Dictionarie, or an In- 
terpreter of Hard English Words, Enabling as well Ladies and 
Gentlewomen, young Scholars, Clerks, Merchants, as also Strangers 
of any Nation to the understanding of the more difficult Authors 
alreadi Printed in our Language — By Henry Cockeram, Gentle- 
man. 

Among the " hard words " which make up Master Cockeram's 
list, are the verbs abate and abandon, both of which are marked 
as " now out of use, and only used of some ancient writers." 
JSTow, both these words occur in the English Bible, in Shake- 
speare and in Milton, and abate, as a term of art in law, could 
never have become obsolete in the dialect of that profession. 
They are now, and have long been, in very current use, both col- 



haps peculiar to it, is an instance of the revival of an obsolete employment, if 
not an obsolete signification, of a word. In nautical language, indeed, as in- 
dicating the destination of a ship, it has been always in use, and is idiomatic 
and proper, but the present extension of its application is an offensive vulgar- 
ism, and is further objectionable, because it is a confounding of words which 
have no relation to each other. When we say a ship is bound to Cadiz, we are 
not employing the past participle of the verb to bind, but the Old-Northern 
participial adjective b li i n n , from the verb at b u a , which signifies, among 
other things, to make ready or prepare. Biiinn is of very frequent occur- 
rence in Icelandic, and it is applied, without distinction, either to ships and 
their company, or to other objects and persons, as expressive of destination, or 
of purpose. It often corresponds to our familiar auxiliary, going, in such phrases 
as, I am going to do this or that. The Scandinavian inhabitants of the North 
of England introduced this word, and in the form bown or boun it has ever 
since remained in general use in the North-English and Scottish dialects ; but 
in English proper, it has long been confined to the nautical vocabulary, 
though sometimes figuratively applied, in a strictly analogous sense, to per- 
sons. The modern corruption consists in employing it in a way that embraces 
the significations, both of the Old-Northern biiinn and of the English parti- 
ciple bound from bind, and it is therefore a gross abuse of language. The 
nautical term wind-bound is literally bound or confined by adverse winds, and 
is not related to bound as denoting destination. The Anglo-Saxon had a verb 
b u a n , cognate with the Icelandic at b u a , but I believe never used in this 
particular sense. The Icelandic participle b li i n n is also used as a sort of 
past auxiliary, much in the sense of the German adjective fertig; as, ek 
er biiinn at skrifa, I have done writing, I have just written. 



Lect. xn.] SUSPENDED ANIMATION OF WOEDS. 241 

loquially and in literature, and the period during which they 
were not familiarly employed must have been a very short one."* 

The introduction of a new word, native or foreign, often 
proves fatal to an old one previously employed in the same or an 
allied sense. Income, for instance, is of recent introduction, 
though Saxon in its elements and form, and it is generally ap- 
plied to the pecuniary product of estates, offices or occupations, 
and even when used with respect to lands, its signification is con- 
fined to the money received for rent, or the net profit accruing 
from the sale of the crops. It corresponds very closely to the 
German Einkommen in etymology, structure, and significa- 
tion, and is a good example of verbal affinity between a Teutonic 
dialect and our own, but we have purchased this convenient word 
by the sacrifice of another, equally expressive, though more re- 
stricted in use, and belonging to the Scandinavian side of Eng- 
lish. I refer to of come, employed by old English writers in the 
sense of produce rather than of prod^c£, though sometimes 
synonymously with the more modern income. We still have the 
old word outcome, and use it much in its primitive sense, a com- 
ing out, a consequence, but the more modern upshot is now often 
substituted for it. 

To persons who desire to watch the progress of change in 
English, periodical literature, and especially the daily journals, 
furnish the best opportunities -for observation, and they are as 

* Ventilate and proclivity, after having been half -forgotten, have come again 
into brisk circulation, and a comparison of the literature of the seventeenth, 
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries will show multitudes of words common 
to the first and last of these periods, but which were little used in the second. 

The most remarkable lists of such words as I am now speaking of are those 
referred to by Trench in the second chapter of his little volume on the author- 
ized version of the New Testament. I will not quote these lists here, because 
throughout this course, I make it a point not to borrow from that very in- 
structive and agreeable writer, and thereby diminish the pleasure which such 
of my hearers as are not already familiar with his works will find in their 
perusal. They are excellent exemplifications of the attractions and value of 
unpretending philological criticism, as distinguished from linguistic investiga- 
tion ; and I know no books on language better calculated to excite curiosity 
and stimulate inquiry into the proper meaning and use of the English tongue, 
than those interesting volumes, The Study of Words, English Past and Pres- 
ent, the Lessons contained in Proverbs, and the essay on the English New 
Testament, to which I have just alluded. 
11 



242 DIALECT OF PEKIODICALS. [Lect. xii. 

faithful in serving up the novelties of speech, as the political and 
commercial news of the day. The advertising columns, especi- 
ally, often contain very odd specimens of both syntax and vo- 
cabulary, and one can scarcely run over a single sheet of a city 
newspaper without noting, among words which merit a place 
nowhere, some which, though excluded from dictionaries, ought 
long ago to have met acceptance. 

In a small fragment of a New York daily paper, published 
within a month, I find these words and phrases, (nearly half of 
them in extracts from English journals,) not any one of which I 
believe any general English dictionary explains : photoglyphic 
engraving; telegram, for telegraphic message; an out-and-out 
extreme clipper ; prospecting for gold ; go-ahead people ; they 
are not on speaking terms / enthusiastic Pacific Slopers antici- 
pate an annual product of a billion of gallons of wine in 1900 ; 
Mr. Gottschalk's rendition of a piece of music ; the Black Swan 
is concertizing in the western States ; the vessel leaked so many 
strokes an hour j an emergent meeting of a society — apparently 
in the sense of a meeting to consider an emergency ; such a man 
ought to be spotted by his associates; old fogy, which by the 
way is an old English word ; such a handsomely-put-on man as 
Mr. Dickens ; and Kossuth's phrase, the solidarity of the peoples. 
Some of these expressions have little claim to be considered 
English, and they belong to the class of words which " come like 
shadows, so depart," but several of them long have been, and 
others will be, permanent members of the colloquial, if not of 
the literary, fraternity of the language. Photoglyphic and tele- 
gram are too recent in origin to be yet entitled to the rights of 
citizenship, but whatever may become of the former, telegram 
will maintain its place, for reasons of obvious convenience ; and 
in spite of the objections of some Hellenists against it as an 
anomalous formation, the English ear is too familiar with Greek 
compounds of the same elements to find this word repugnant to 
our own principles of etymology. 



LECTUKE XIII. 

INTERJECTIONS AND INTONATIONS. 

In a historical sketch of the genetic development of the parts 
of speech, we should naturally begin with the Interjection, both 
because it is the earliest of distinct human vocal sounds, and be- 
cause it is a spontaneous voice prompted by nature, and not, like 
other words, learned by imitation, or taught by formal instruc- 
tion. This is at least the character of the true interjection, though 
the want of a specific term, and the inconvenience which would 
result from a too copious and minute grammatical nomenclature, 
oblige us to include under the same appellation words, and even 
entire phrases, whose resemblance to that part of speech lies chiefly 
in being, like it, introduced into a period with which they are not 
syntactically connected. 

Of the elements of discourse, there is no one which has received 
so little attention from grammarians as the part of speech in 
question. Few treatises on language devote more than a page or 
two to the subject, and many writers have denied to interjections 
the character' of words altogether. I think that, with most gram- 
marians, this is a prejudice arising from the fact, that these words 
seem to have no appropriate place in so artificial a system as that 
of the Latin grammar, from which we have derived most of our 
ideas of the structure of language. They can neither be declined 
nor conjugated ; they are incapable of degrees of comparison ; 
they govern nothing, qualify nothing, connect nothing, and may 
be left out of the period altogether without affecting the syntacti- 
cal propriety of its structure. In short, they cannot be parsed. 
They have no position in the rank and file of the legion, and there- 
fore are at best supernumeraries, if not intruders. In a language 
so cemented and compacted together as the Latin, not by mortar 
or pins of independent material and formation, but by organic at- 
tachments, natural hooks and eyes, congenital with the words and 

(243) 



244: INTEEJECTIONS NOT SYNTACTICAL. [Lect. xiii. 

of one substance with them, this objection to the recognition of 
constituents so incapable of assimilation is by no means without 
validity ; but in English, and in those other tongues where the re- 
lations between important words are determined by mere position 
or by the aid of distinct and insignificant particles, it strikes us 
much less forcibly. I shall endeavor to vindicate the claim of 
these neglected articulations to rank as legitimate means of vocally 
expressing human passions, states, affections, and therefore to be 
called words, though of a rhetorical and dramatic, not of a logical 
or didactic character. 

Considered as a purely natural and spontaneous emission of the 
voice, we might expect to find similar interjections in all human 
tongues, but their forms, even when they most resemble each 
other, are modified by the same obscure influences which diversify 
the action of the organs of speech in the production of like or 
analogous sounds among different nations, and consequently they 
are by no means identical in different languages. The alleged 
diversity in the cries of the infant and in the true interjections — 
which utterances, psychologically considered, belong to the same 
general class of expressive sounds — has been urged by some physi- 
ologists as a proof of a diversity of origin in the human race. But 
the argument loses something of its weight when it is shown, as 
it may be, that in numerous other cases, words common to two or 
more demonstrably cognate nations, and identical in form, and 
even in sound so far as any written notation can express sound, 
are nevertheless differenced in their pronunciation by those nations, 
as widely as the true interjections are by unrelated races. These 
distinctions are occasioned by two proximate causes ; the one is 
the employment of different sets of muscles, by different peoples, 
for the production of the same or similar sounds, the other is the 
peculiar quality impressed upon articulate sounds by the intona- 
tion with which they are uttered. 

These two classes of linguistic facts, the production, namely, of 
like or analogous sounds in different languages by the employ- 
ment of different organs, or at least muscles, and the fixed char- 
acter of national intonation in certain languages, have as yet been 
little investigated by philologists, but they are full of curious in- 
terest, and the study of them, however difficult, is essential to the 
construction of even a tolerably complete system of phonology. 



Lect. xiii.] INTONATIONS. 245 

Nice distinctions between related sounds depend of course upon 
the mechanical means employed to produce them, and one reason 
why an adult so seldom succeeds in mastering the pronunciation 
of a foreign language, why he is at once recognized as a stranger 
by his articulation even of words which, according to grammars 
and dictionaries, are identical with syllables and words of his 
mother-tongue, is, that to pronounce them like a native, he must 
call into play muscles not employed, or employed in a different 
way, in speaking his own language, and which have become so 
rigid from disuse, that he cannot acquire the command of them, 
or, in other words, render them what are called voluntary mus- 
cles. Further, the organs of speech act and react upon each other ; 
the frequent play of a given set of muscles modifies the action of 
neighboring or related muscles ; there is, to use a word, which, if 
not now English, soon will be, a certain solidarity between them 
all, and organs accustomed to the deep gutturals of the Arabic, 
the hissing and lisping sounds of the English, or the nasals of the 
French and Portuguese, are with difficulty trained to the pure 
articulation of languages like the Italian, in which such elements 
do not exist. 

National peculiarities of intonation are still more subtle and ob- 
scure, and they are almost equally difficult to seize by the ear, and 
to reproduce by the lips and tongue.* To us, whose intonations 
belong not to the individual word, but to the whole period, it is 
difficult to conceive of the tone with which a word is uttered, as 
a constant, essential, characteristic, and expressive ingredient of 
the word itself. But in monosyllabic languages like the Chinese, 
where the number of words, differing in the vowel and conso- 
nantal elements of which they are composed, must necessarily be 

* An interesting instance of the capacity of young children for appreciating 
and repeating such intonations, was given me by an intelligent American 
mother, who had been residing for a short time in Genoa. She had two or 
three boys, somewhere from three to six years of age, and shortly after her ar- 
rival in Genoa, and too soon for the children to have learned the native dialect, 
she heard them, as they were playing on the side- walk in front of her apart- 
ment, talking together in what appeared to her Genoese. On going to them 
and listening attentively, she found they were not speaking at all, but merely 
uttering a rapid succession of unmeaning vocables closely resembling in sound 
the actual words they were daily hearing, while at the same time they perfect- 
ly imitated the peculiar sing-song which characterizes the Genoese dialect. 



246 INTONATIONS. [Lect. xm. 

very small, other distinctions must be resorted to, and accordingly 
we find that in such languages a monosyllable, consisting perhaps 
of one vowel and one or two consonantal elements, and which ad- 
mits of but one mode of spelling in alphabetic characters, may 
nevertheless have a great number of meanings, each indicated by 
a peculiarity of intonation not perhaps appreciable by foreign ears, 
but nevertheless readily recognizable by a native. These pecu- 
liarities are, however, by no means confined to languages so alien 
to our own, for they exist in the Danish and the Swedish, both of 
which are nearly allied to English, and they, no doubt, occur to a 
considerable, but thus far uninvestigated, extent, in other tongues 
more familiar to most of us. In such languages, these intonations 
are constant, and they are also expressive and significant, so far 
that certain words are under all circumstances pronounced with 
the same intonation, and thus distinguished from words differing 
from them in signification, but otherwise identical in sound. 
Scandinavian phonologists have made these intonations, for which 
the vocabulary of our language does not even furnish names, a sub- 
ject of special inquiry ; and Rask, one of the most eminent of modern 
philologists, has subtilized so far upon them, that few of his own 
countrymen, even, have sufficient acuteness of ear to follow him. 
But this is not strange, when we learn that the same discriminat- 
ing phonologist fancied he could detect, what no Englishman or 
American ever did, a difference between the pronunciation of our 
•two English words pale, pallid, and pail, a water-bucket.* An 
Englishman or an American may make a difference between pail 
and pale, but it is an accidental difference arising from the con- 
text ; as, for instance, when we speak of i a pale, sickly girl,' or, 
on the other hand, when we say, ' Mrs. A 's dress w&spale yel- 
low.' Here the two words may be pronounced with a difference 
of intonation ; whereas in, ' I sent my Irish housemaid for a pail 
of water,' is hardly susceptible of such variation. 

Yet more ethereal than even these subtle shades of difference, 
is what, to borrow a musical term, may be called the mode in 
which a given language is spoken. A stranger in Greece or the 
East is struck at once by a certain sadness of tone, amounting at 
times almost to wailing, which marks the speech of the people, 

* Kask's Danish Grammar for the use of Englishmen. 



Lect. xiil] INTONATIONS. 247 

and especially of the women of the lower classes. Some travellers 
have ascribed this to the long centuries of humiliation and op- 
pression under which women have groaned in the East ; but I 
think it belongs rather to the races than to the sex ; for it is riot 
altogether confined to the women : and, besides, something of the 
same sort is found among the most primitive and simple tribes, 
and the fact, if it is a fact, that the music of ancient Greece and 
Latium, like that of most Oriental countries, was wholly in the 
minor mode, seems to confirm this view. 

The Greek, or to speak more specifically, Alexandrian and 
other colonial grammarians, carefully investigated the intonation 
of their language, in both its branches, accentuation and vocal in- 
flection, and they invented several points, which we call accents, 
to indicate the particular intonation of the important syllables of 
the words. What the signification of these points was we do not 
know ; nor does the pronunciation of the modern Greeks afford 
us any light on the subject. What we call accent, that is, stress 
of voice, has been generally supposed to have been, among other 
things, marked by them ; but this is disputed. Metrical quantity 
or prosody, they certainly did not indicate, but left it to general 
rules, which, in most cases, were sufficiently explicit. The quan- 
tity, or relative duration of syllables as it is generally understood, 
is a quality of sound to which the Greek ear was acutely sensible, 
and it appears to have been recognized in the earlier Teutonic di- 
alects ; but to modern ears, it is, as an element of prosody, much 
less appreciable. In English verse, and more especially by recent 
poets, rhythm has been made to depend upon and consist in ac- 
centuation alone, and those other elements of articulation, which 
to the ancient classical nations constituted the very essence of 
poetical melody, are, by the fashion of the day, altogether dis- 
regarded. This, I think, is a mistake, but it will be more fitly 
considered on another occasion. 

But, to return from what may be considered a digression, the 
true interjections, though modified by peculiarities of intonation, 
have at least a family resemblance, if not an absolute identity in 
most known languages. They are, for the greater part, mono- 
syllabic, and frequently consist of a vowel preceded or followed 
by an aspirate or an aspirated guttural only, though they are not 
always of so simple a structure. Some linguists distinguish be- 



248 SIMILAEITY OF INTEEJECTIONS. [Lect. xm. 

tween interjections which are bare indications of mental or phys- 
ical pain or pleasure, and those which are expressive of sensnons 
impressions derived from external objects through the organs of 
sight and hearing ; but for our present purpose it is not essential 
to inquire how far this classification is well founded. The claim 
of interjections of the purely involuntary character to be classed 
among what grammarians call the parts of speech, has been dispu- 
ted, as I have already remarked, on the ground of their alleged 
want of a truly articulate character, and especially of all etymo- 
logical and syntactical connection with the periods of discourse. 
It is for this reason that the name of interjection, from the Latin 
inter jicio, I throw in, has been applied to them, as some- 
thing casually dropped into the sentence, but not logically be- 
longing to it, or having any grammatical relations with it. It is 
said that such interjections belong to speech, only in that figura- 
tive sense in which all the means whereby external facts are made 
known to us are comprised within the term language, and they 
are assimilated to those inarticulate cries which constitute the 
language of the lower animals. They are generally spontaneous, 
involuntary exclamations, and they express, in a vague and inde- 
terminate way, the simple fact that the utterer is painfully or 
pleasurably affected, without in themselves giving any indication 
of the cause, or even always of the specific character, of the 
emotion or sensation. The interjection has, however, one import- 
ant peculiarity, which not only vindicates its claim to be regard- 
ed as a constituent of language, but entitles it unequivocally to a 
high rank among the elements of discourse. It is in itself ex- 
pressive and significant, though indeed in a low degree, whereas 
at least in uninflected languages like the English, other words, 
detached from their grammatical connections, are meaningless, 
and become intelligible only as members of a period. If I utter 
an interjectional exclamation denoting pain, joy, sorrow, surprise, 
or anger, every person who hears me understands at once that I 
am agitated by the corresponding affection. Here, then, a fact is 
communicated by a single syllable, and the interjection may be 
regarded as the hieroglyphical or symbolical expression of a whole 
period. But, on the other hand, if I pronounce the word house, 
or run, or red, or ten, without other words, and without accom- 
panying gestures or other explanatory circumstances, I tell the 



Lect. xni.] ENTEKJECTIONS PAETS OF SPEECH. 249 

listener nothing, though the word may, indeed, from accident or 
from some obscure chain of association, excite in his mind an im- 
age of the object, or an intellectual conception of the act, or acci- 
dent, or number, denoted by the word I use. He may, in short, 
suppose a subject, an object, a copula, or whatever predicate is 
necessary to complete the period, and thus arbitrarily or conjec- 
turally supply the ellipsis. This, in fact, from the habit of indi- 
vidualizing the general, and making concrete the abstract, he can 
hardly fail to do, but nevertheless, in the absence of explanatory 
circumstances, this mental operation of the auditor neither logi- 
cally results from, nor is warranted by, the force of the word I 
have uttered, which of itself communicates no fact, authorizes no 
inference. And herein lies the great miracle of speech, the 
strongest proof of its living, organic — I had almost said divine — 
power, that even as the processes of vegetable life build up, as- 
similate, vivify, and transform into self-sustaining, growing, and 
fruitful forms the dead material of mechanical nature, so language, 
by the mere collocation and ordonnance of inexpressive articulate 
sounds, can inform them with the spiritual philosophy of the 
Pauline epistles, the living thunder of a Demosthenes, or the 
material picturesqueness of Russell's Letters in the Times. 

The interjections hitherto described are distinguished from the 
other parts of speech, not only by their inherent and independent 
expressiveness, (a point in which they have a certain analogy with 
words imitative of natural sounds, and therefore significant of 
them,) but by the fact that they are subjectively connected with 
the passion or sensation they denote, and are not so much the enun- 
ciation or utterance of the emotion, as symptoms and evidences 
of it ; in fact, a mode of thinking aloud. In the other articulate 
forms of communication by which we make known our mental 
or bodily state, that state becomes objective, and therefore those 
forms are descriptive, not expressive. Accordingly, the inter- 
jection may be said to be the appropriate language, the mother- 
tongue of passion ; and hence much of the effect of good acting 
depends on the proper introduction and right articulation of this 
element of speech. It is related of Whitfield, that his interjec- 
tions, his reduplicative Ah ! of pity for the unrepentant sinner, 
his diphthongal Oh ! of encouragement and persuasion for the al- 
most converted listener, formed one of the great excellences of 
11* 



250 VOCAL GESTUKES. [Lect. xih. 

his oratory, and constituted a most effective engine in his pnlpit 
artillery. 

There is a species of interjection not usually distinguished by 
English grammarians from other words of that class, but which 
some German writers expressively call Lautgeberden, or 
vocal-gestures. These approach much more nearly to the charac- 
ter of other words than those of which we have hitherto spoken. 
The spontaneous interjections constitute a kind of self-communion, 
and though conveying information of a certain sort to others, they 
are not uttered with any such conscious purpose. The L a u t g e - 
b e r d e , on the other hand, is not a mere involuntary expression 
of sensation or emotion, but is addressed to other persons or crea- 
tures, and usually indicates a desire or command, so that it corre- 
sponds to the imperative of verbs in complete periods. Among 
these Lautgeberden, are all the isolated, monosyllabic or 
longer words, by which we invite or repel the approach, and check 
or encourage the efforts of others ; in short, all single detached 
articulations, intended to influence the action, or call the attention, 
of others, but not syntactically connected with a period. Analo- 
gous to these are certain passionate expressions, sometimes forming 
whole periods, but more commonly abridged, and used interjec- 
tionally. They are sometimes reduced to a single word, some- 
times composed of several, but usually without any grammatical 
connection with what precedes or follows them. In this class are 
embraced most familiar optative and deprecatory forms of ex- 
pression, and especially the invocation of blessings and denuncia- 
tion of curses. Farewell, welcome, goodbye, (originally distinct 
periods, but not interjectional,) Heaven forbid, and other similar 
ejaculations, are of this character. The Greek, especially in pas- 
sionate declamation, is full of such phrases. Those familiar with 
Demosthenes will remember a striking instance in the Fourth 
Philippic, where, in an interjectional form, he invokes the ven- 
geance of the gods on Philip of Macedon. This is a peculiarly 
interesting example, because it is one of the few where a syntac- 
tical relation exists between the ejaculation and the period into 
which it is introduced ; for the execration, oinep avrov i^o\iaeiav\ 
begins with a relative pronoun, which grammatically connects it 
with the preceding denunciation of Philip, as an enemy to Athens 
and her gods. 



Lect. xiii.] INTEEJECTIONS SOMETIMES SYNTACTICAL. 251 

It is affirmed that in the Enscara or Basque, the interjections 
are regularly declinable,* and it would hence appear that their 
want of syntactical character in the Indo-European languages is 
not an essential feature of this part of speech. 

Allied in form and nature to the true interjection, but wholly 
distinct from the constant intonations belonging to particular 
words in certain languages, to which I have already alluded, are 
the modulations of the voice in articulate speech, which, as con- 
stituting a characteristic difference between the breathing, spoken 
word, and its silent written representative, between the subjective 
and the objective elements of language, between living action and 
historical narration, are among the most powerful instrumentali- 
ties whereby man acts on the moral nature of his fellow-man. f 
The unstudied accents of young children are prompted by nature. 
They are more truly spontaneous, and not less expressive, than 
the notes of the forest song-bird, and they are the most touching 
and persuasive of human utterances. But with the sincerity and 
frankness of lisping childhood, passes away the truthfulness of its 
tones. Dissimulation, hypocrisy, and the thousand forms of social 
falsehood, almost extirpate the heaven-born faculty of significant 
modulation, and the voice soon becomes as artificial as the gait, 
the gestures, and the other outward habits of the man. Affecta- 
tion, the desire of seeming to be that which we are not, is the be- 
setting sin of men. As a plain, simple, unaffected manner in 
speech, in gesture, in carriage, is one of the most attractive of ex- 
ternal qualities, so it is one of the most difficult of acquirements ; 
for in all grades of society, from the wigwam to the palace, the 
most natural thing in the world is to be unnatural. 

* In the more familiar European languages we find many examples of. vari- 
ation of form in words usually classed among the indeclinabUs. Thus in 
Mediaeval Italian conciosiacosache and concibfossecosache are respectively pres- 
ent and past forms of a compound, or rather aggregate, conjunction, signify- 
ing although ; and it is a curious peculiarity of Portuguese that the infinitive, 
when preceded by a preposition, is regularly inflected for number and person. 
Thus, Ver, to see, if used with a plural, becomes Vermos, Verdes, 
and Ver em when the subject is of the first, second, or third person plural. 
So, in the Lusiad, Camoens hud: para ver em trabalhos excessivos 
— that they may experience severe trials. 

t Fuller, in his Holy State, p. 90, says of Mr. Perkins : "He would pro- 
nounce the word Damne with such an emphasis as left a dolefull echo in his 
auditours' ears a good while after." 



252 MODULATIONS OF VOICE. [Lect. xra. 

But besides this half -voluntary distortion of our natural faculty 
of speech, the injudicious methods by which reading is taught 
do very much to fix, as well as to originate, a formal, monoto- 
nous, and unnatural intonation. The habit of mechanical inex- 
pressive delivery, once contracted, is almost incurable ; and it is 
a trite observation that so simple a thing as a clear, appropriate, 
and properly intoned and emphasized pronunciation, in reading 
aloud, is one of the rarest as well as most desirable of social ac- 
complishments. Few persons are able, when the eye is fixed 
upon a printed or written page, or even in reciting what they 
have learned by heart, to modulate the voice, as they would do 
in the unpremeditated conversational utterance of their own 
thoughts in the same words ; and the. difference between our 
modes of reading and speaking is not confined to the modulation 
of the period, but extends itself to single words, so that it is ex- 
tremely common, especially among persons not much practised 
in reading aloud, to use one system of orthoepy in conversation, 
and quite another in reading. But the evil habits we contract in 
our school exercises are productive of further mischief. They 
are highly injurious to the physical organs of speech. And this 
is one reason why clergymen, who, in the religious services of 
most sects, read much aloud, are so much more frequently an- 
noyed with bronchial affections, than lawyers and political ora- 
tors, who use the voice much more, and with louder and more 
impassioned articulation, but who for the most part speak extem- 
poraneously, and with a more natural delivery. 

As has been already observed, the classes of words and of 
vocal modulations which we have been considering belong to, if 
they do not constitute, the language of passion, and therefore it 
is, as we have already hinted, equally a rule of morality and good 
taste to practise great caution and circumspection in the employ- 
ment of them. 

What are called expletives in rhetorical treatises are grammati- 
cally allied to the interjections, though widely different from them 
by the want of meaning, while the interjection is always expressive. 
I can hardly agree with Webster in his definition of the exple- 
tive, and still less in the statement with which he concludes it. 
" The expletive," says Webster, " is a word or syllable not 
necessary to the sense, but inserted to fill a vacancy or for orna- 



Lect. xni.] EXPLETIVES. . 253 

nient. The Greek language abounds with expletives." So far 
as the word answers no other purpose than to " fill a vacancy," it 
is properly expletive, but if it be appropriate and graceful enough 
to deserve the name of an " ornament," it is not superfluous, and 
therefore is not an expletive. In most cases, indeed, the vacancy 
filled by words of this class is not merely a defect of continuity 
in the syntax, but it indicates a positive want of thought, and 
ignorant and illogical persons are naturally very prone to inter- 
lard their discourse with these fragmentary expressions. The 
frequent use of interjections, expletives, and vague or unmeaning 
phrases of all kinds, is therefore inadmissible in a really elegant 
and graceful conversational style ; * and though I hope the cau- 
tion is superfluous, I should not do justice to my subject, were I 
to omit to express my full concurrence in the condemnation 
which, for intellectual as well as social and moral reasons alike, 
persons of culture award to the employment of profane lan- 
guage, — a vice eminently ungraceful in itself, and vulgarizing in 
its influence. " Othes," says King James, " are but a use, and a 
sinne clothed with no delight nor gaine, and therefore the more 
inexcusable in the sight of men." 

The remark with which Webster accompanies his definition of 
the word expletive, namely, that the Greek language abounds in 
such, is in my opinion as erroneous as the definition is defective. 
The Greeks, like the modern Italians, were an exceedingly ex- 
citable and impressible people, and like them, they used a great 
number of interjections. We certainly are far from being able 
to discover the precise force of these ; still less can we find 
equivalents for them in a language which, like ours, is spoken by 
a graver and more reserved people, and therefore possesses fewer 
words of this class ; but with regard to the numerous particles 
and other words which Webster apparently classes among exple- 
tives, we are not authorized to infer that they were superfluous 
to the sense of the passages where they occur, barely because we 

* I believe our English, cousins more frequently offend against this rule of 
good taste than do we Americans. I know many even of the higher classes 
who rarely utter the simplest sentence without interjecting at least one don't 
you know, or you, know. I have known an eloquent Yaudois pastor, who 
often astonished me by strengthening his affirmations with an adjuration of 
the god of wine— per Bacco ! 



254 EXPLETIVES. [Lect. xm. 

do not see the necessity of them. The supposition is contrary to 
all we know of the habits of the Greek mind, and it is much 
safer to presume that they had a meaning and a force, which our 
imperfect knowledge of the niceties of the language forbids us 
to appreciate, than to believe that Plato, and Aristotle, and 
Xenophon thought so inconsecutively as to be obliged to fill the 
interstices of their mental structures with insignificant rubbish. 

In commencing the study of foreign languages, we meet with 
many words, to which dictionaries assign no distinct meaning, 
and which appear superfluous to the sense of the period, and 
therefore to be expletives. But further study generally shows 
us that they, however difficult to define in themselves, have, 
nevertheless, an important influence on the sense of the period, 
by strengthening, moderating, or otherwise qualifying, the sig- 
nification of leading words. The German, as well as the Greek, 
is rich in these particles, and the existence of German as a liv- 
ing speech enables foreigners to acquire a much clearer compre- 
hension of these, at first sight insignificant, elements than is 
possible in the case of a language, which, like the Greek, sur- 
vives only as a written tongue. 

The Greek and Latin languages are remarkably distinguished 
from each other in the number and the character of the interjec- 
tions ; and it will in general be found that the use and significa- 
tion of the interjections employed in any language furnish a very 
tolerable key to the character of the people who speak it. The 
modern Italians have inherited from their Roman ancestors a 
great number of elliptical passionate phrases, which are employed 
in this way, and the frequent introduction of the names of the 
heathen deities, together with those of the Yirgin Mary and 
the saints in their ejaculatory exclamations, produces a ludi- 
crous effect upon a stranger. One of these has even found its 
way into German and English. In the comedies and other light 
literature of both, in the last century, it is of frequent occurrence, 
and if we can judge from them, it was very current in fashionable 
society, though probably few of the fine ladies, who so often ex 
claimed, O, gemini ! (jiminy or jemini,) knew that the phrase was 
a Latin invocation of the divine brothers, Castor and Pollux.* 

* The Italian diamine! is a different word, in diaboli nomine! 



LECTUKE XIY. 

THE NOUN, ADJECTIVE, AND VERB. 

It is not disputed, that in the genesis of language the interjec- 
tion, even if not technically a part of speech, and the onomato- 
poetic or imitative words, must be regarded as the primary lin- 
guistic utterances ; but grammatical physiologists differ much with 
respect to the order of succession in the other principal parts of 
speech. Presented in the usual form of a historical problem, the 
inquiry is an idle one, for the noun, whether substantive or ad- 
jective, and the verb, can be conceived of as existing only as mem- 
bers of a period or proposition, and therefore the noun supposes 
the verb, and the verb the noun. With the exception of the 
Lautgeberden, or vocal-gestures, and the imitative sounds, 
words are as essentially and necessarily social as man himself, and a 
single word can no more spring into spontaneous life, or exist in 
isolation, than can the intelligent being who uses it. We know 
external objects only by their sensuous properties and their action, 
and we must necessarily suppose all names of objects to have been 
primarily descriptive, because we can imagine no possible ground 
of a name, but the ascription of a quality or an act as character- 
istic of the object named. It would seem, then, that before the 
name could be applied, the adjective or the verb expressive of the 
quality or act, the predicate, in short, must exist; and on the 
other hand, as concrete ideas must precede abstract ones, we can- 
not comprehend the origin of the adjective or the verb, inde- 
pendently of the noun, or name of some object possessing the 
quality, or habitually practising the act, predicated by the adjec- 
tive or verb. But though words have no separate individual ex- 
istence, though they live and move only in interdependence upon 
each other, yet in studying their forms and organization, each 
must be primarily investigated by itself, because the limited nature 
of our faculties, whether sensuous or intellectual, obliges us to ac- 

(255) 



256 GRAMMATICAL NOMENCLATURE. [Lect. xiy. 

quire the knowledge of the whole by the successive study of its 
parts, of the complex, through an acquaintance with the simple 
elements of which it is conceived to be composed. 

In order to comprehend the physiology of a given language, or 
the functions and relations of its organs, a knowledge of its anat- 
omy, or the normal structure of these organs, is necessary, and 
we will therefore examine briefly the formal characteristics of 
English words. These we have already considered in their bear- 
ing upon etymology, and though we are now to look at them 
from a different point of view, the facts are still the same, and I 
must accordingly be pardoned for some repetition of what, indeed, 
I by no means suppose to have been new when I first presented 
it. I do not propose in the present course to attempt a formal 
examination of every class of vocables into which grammarians 
have divided language, and I shall only discuss the character and 
offices of the noun or substantive, the adjective and the verb. I 
begin with the noun or substantive, not as historically first, or 
logically pre-eminent, but because, in learning words by the pro- 
cess of domestic instruction called the natural method, we com- 
mence with names. 

Before proceeding further, it will not be amiss to suggest an 
observation or two upon the names which grammarians have 
given to these parts of speech. The word noun is derived from 
the Latin n o m e n , a name, and is a very appropriate designa- 
tion for the substantive, which is properly the name of an object. 
English grammarians generally include under the noun the ad- 
jective, and speak of nouns substantive and nouns adjective. The 
ground of this nomenclature is the theory, that the adjective is to 
be regarded as the name of an accident or quality existing not in- 
dependently or abstractly, but only in the concrete, and that the 
term which designates an accident is not properly entitled to a 
separate grammatical position, but must be considered as a mere 
appendage or adjunct of the substantive. But this view is with- 
out any solid foundation. The verb is as truly the name of the 
act or status it represents, as the adjective of the quality it ex- 
presses, and there would be the same propriety in styling the 
former the noun verbal, as the latter the noun adjective. The 
designations noun substantive an'd noun adjective, even if logical- 
ly accurate, are moreover objectionable for grammatical purposes, 



Lect. xiy.] GRAMMATICAL NOMENCLATURE. 257 

as being awkward and unwieldy. I therefore discard them, and 
though I may occasionally employ substantive, to vary the phrase, 
yet I shall generally use noun as equivalent to noun substantive, 
and not as embracing the adjective, which I consider as included 
in it only by a misnomer. 

The Roman grammarians applied to the member of the propo- 
sition which predicates of a subject being, state, volition, action or 
perception, the name of verbum, or the word, as emphati- 
cally the most important vocable in the period, or as the word 
which asserts, and in a sense embodies the proposition ; and the 
term verb, commonly employed in most European languages, like 
other technical words of modern grammar, is derived from the 
Latin appellation. German philologists, however, commonly 
style the verb Zeitwort, time-word, because the verb, by its 
form or by the aid of auxiliaries, generally expresses the period of 
the act or status described, as past, present, or future, and of course 
involves the notion of time. But this nomenclature appears to 
me highly objectionable. "Whenever we describe or name an ob- 
ject by a quality either unessential, or relatively unimportant, to 
our conception of its true character, we utter a philological un- 
truth, and proclaim a philosophical error. We can as easily ab- 
stract the notion of an act or a condition from time, as we can 
that of color, or any other sensuous quality. We can as well 
imagine the act of running, or striking, without any reference to 
the period when the act takes place, as we can the property of 
redness, of weight, of sourness, or sweetness, and therefore, al- 
though the variable forms of verbs usually express time, yet to 
the primary notion conveyed by the verb, time is as unessential 
as it is to our conception of the taste of an orange. We may 
go further, and affirm that in strictness all verbs express pres- 
ent time, when they refer to time at all. In the process of 
ratiocination, we think by general terms alone, without reference 
to time, but it is certain that when we individualize an act or 
state, the image which it suggests is necessarily a present one. 1 
have done, and like forms, were originally present or aorist, as for 
example, I have deposited ten pounds with the Barings meant I 
ha/ve, in deposit with the Barings, ten pounds j but, as in order 
to have it in deposit, a previous act of deposition was necessary, 
the past sense was gradually attributed to the phrase. Whether 



258 YEEB NOT TIME-WOED. [Lect. xiv. 

I say, " Mr. Clmrcli painted his Heart of the Andes last year," or 
" Mr. Church will paint the Jungfrau next year," the picture and 
the painter are not past or future to my imagination, but present ; 
and therefore the verb I use excites, in both my mind and that of 
my hearer, a notion of a present artist and a present act. The 
imagination lives in a perpetual now. The notion of an individ- 
ual event as having been or as yet to be, is a purely logical con- 
ception, and only general propositions which exist in words alone, 
only that which we cannot picture to ourselves, that which has no 
specific reality and is only a mere intellectual figment, can be de- 
tached from the notion of present time at all. In most languages, 
verbs have forms which exclude the notion of time, as, for exam- 
ple, the infinitive as used in modern English ; and even the forms 
grammatically expressive of time are, in general propositions, em- 
ployed aoristically, or without any reference to time. For exam- 
ple, when I say, " birds fly," I do not affirm that birds are now 
flying, that they actually did fly, or will fly, at any past or future 
point of time, but simply that the power of flight is at all times an 
attribute of the bird. The present tense of the verb to fly, as thus 
used, is as absolutely independent of time as the noun bird, or the 
adjective red, by which I may qualify it. If the expression of 
time is an inherent necessity of the verb, special forms for the 
future as well as the present and the past ought to be universal, 
but in most modern European languages, the future is a compound, 
the elements of which are a present auxiliary and an aorist infini- 
tive, for in the phrases I shall go, he will go, shall and will are 
in the present tense, and go is aoristic. The Anglo-Saxon, with a 
single exception in the case of a substantive verb, had absolutely no 
mode of expressing the future by any verbal form, simple or com- 
pound. The context alone determined the time, and in German, 
in the Scandinavian dialects, and in English, as also in Italian and 
in the other modern Latin tongues, the future is very commonly 
expressed, as it is in Anglo-Saxon, by a present. Ich gehe 
morgen nach Philadelphie, I go, or I am going, to 
Philadelphia to-morrow, are more frequently used by Germans 
and Englishmen than ich werde gehen, I shall or will go ; 
and the adverbial nouns morgen and to-morrow, not the verbs 
gehen and go, are the true time-words. The use of the pres- 
ent for the past, too, especially in spirited narrative and in poetry, 



Lect. xiv.] VERB NOT TIME-WORD. 259 

is not less familiar, and in both these cases the expression of time 
belongs to the grammatical period, not to the verb. 

The missionary Bowen, whose grammar and dictionary of the 
Yoruba language are about to be published by the Smithsonian 
Institution, informs us that in that tongue the verbs have no in- 
flections whatever for mood, tense, number, or person, and that 
all logical and grammatical relations of the verb are expressed by 
particles and auxiliaries. To call the verb the time-word is there- 
fore to name it by an accident, not by an essential characteristic ; 
by an occasional, not a universal property. In fact, nearly the 
whole modern German scientific terminology is objectionable for 
similar reasons, and, as I have before attempted to show, also on 
higher philosophical grounds. The simple word verb is prefer- 
able to any other designation, not because, when we study its 
etymology, we find it truly descriptive, as indicating the relative 
importance of this word in the period, but precisely for the op- 
posite reason, namely, that to English ears it is not descriptive at 
all, but purely arbitrary, and therefore is susceptible of exact 
definition, and not by its very form suggestive of incongruous 
images or mistaken theory. 

The simplest, and for the purposes of the present course, the 
best definition of the noun is that it is the name of a person, place, 
or thing, of that, in short, which may be an object of thought, 
whether as a sensuous perception or as an intellectual concep- 
tion, or in other words, that which may be the subject of a 
proposition. 

Grammarians and logicians divide nouns into a great number 
of classes, but we shall find it sufficient for our object to regard 
only the most general division, which is that into proper nouns, 
or names of individual persons, places, or things, as Cicero, New 
York, Great Eastern ; and common nouns, which are applied to 
whole species, genera, classes, as man, city, ship. 

The resemblance between the noun, as an English part of 
speech, and the noun of other languages, is closer than that 
between the verb or even the adjective and their foreign repre- 
sentatives. Our noun has usually the distinction of number, one 
inflection of case (the genitive or possessive) and sometimes even 
gender; so that all the formal characteristics of this class of 
words are more or less fully exemplified in English grammar, 



260 GRAMMATICAL NOMENCLATURE. [Lect. xiv. 

which does not distinguish the noun by syntactical or logical 
peculiarities. 

Whatever of special interest, therefore, attaches to the English 
noun, must depend upon its etymological character, or the extent 
to which it may be derived from, or converted into, other parts 
of speech, the changes of signification which particular nouns 
undergo, and the number of distinct objects to which our lan- 
guage has given appropriate names. The very important ques- 
tion of the relation between the signification of nouns and the 
moral and intellectual character of those who employ them, has 
been already touched upon, and its more full consideration be- 
longs elsewhere. First, then, of nouns as originative or deriva- 
tive, as etymological material, or etymological product. There 
are languages in which almost all words may interchangeably as- 
sume every syntactical and logical relation, and each root in its 
turn run through all the grammatical categories. Of all the im- 
provements which could be devised for speech, if speech were 
susceptible of artificial amelioration, this would be one of the 
most convenient. Our word hand may serve as an example of 
this ; we have from this root the verb to hand, to deliver by hand, 
and as Milton uses it, to join hands ; the verb handle, to use or 
hold with the hand, to manipulate, and, figuratively, to treat of 
or discuss ; the adjectives handleable, that which may be handled, 
handless, without hands, handy, skilful, ingenious, convenient, 
or what is still better expressed by the Latin dexterous, to which 
the etymological correlative would be righthandy / the adverb 
handily, skilfully ; the secondary noun handle, that by which a 
thing is lifted, and, more remotely, the adjective handsome, and 
adverb handsomely, which, however, are of doubtful etymology, 
and used in a sense very divergent from that of the supposed 
root. Besides these derivatives, we have numerous compounds 
into which hand enters, but these do not belong to the subject 
we are at this moment pursuing. The power of thus varying the 
noun is a real advantage which modern English has, or had (for 
at present we make much less use of it than formerly) over the 
Anglo-Saxon. In the struggle between Norman French and 
Anglo-Saxon after the Conquest, the native dialect of England 
was for a time subdued, and undoubtedly in real danger of ex- 



Lect. xiy.] NOUNS EN" ETYMOLOGY. 261 

termination. When at length it revived, it was with niuch loss 
of its pristine power. Its inflections were gone, and its facility 
of composition very much restricted. These it strove in vain to 
regain, but in its efforts it struck out a new path of improvement, 
and but for the influence of classical literature, which printing 
made predominant, and the consequent introduction of numerous 
Latin words and forms, that path would have been pursued to very 
important results.* The Anglo-Saxon was rather synthetical than 
analytical in its tendencies, and adopted new combinations and com- 
positions with great ease, but lent itself less readily to derivative 
changes. Hence, though there are, I think, not less than a hun- 
dred Saxon compounds into which the noun hand enters, yet the 
only true derivatives I find arehandlian and handle, where- 
as we have made five or six new English uncompounded words 
from this one root. At present, the movement is quite in the 
contrary direction, and we incline in more ways than one to bor- 
row from foreign sources rather than to grow from our own 
germs, and manufacture from our own material. The verbaliza- 
tion, if I may so express it, of a noun, is now a difficult matter, 
and we sin-ink from the employment even of well-authorized old 
nominal verbs. It is to old English that we owe our verbs to man, 
to house, to horse,\ to wood and to water, to game, to saddle and 
bridle, to shield, to sail, to fine, to fish, to fowl, to stone, (lapidare, 
Lat.,) to dust, {stauben, Ger., spolverare, It.,) to sand a floor, 
to iron clothes or a wagon, to shoe a horse, {ferrer un cheval, 
Fr.) Shakespeare and Sylvester even go the length of forming 
a verb from the generic name of a divinity : 

Some, Godding Fortune, idol of ambition ; 

godding being used for deifying. To dishearten maintains its 
ground, but the place of its converse to hearten is generally sup- 
plied by the much inferior French verb to encourage, though 
some eminent writers have lately revived our excellent old word, 

* See Lecture xviii. 

f The following advertisement is an example of an arbitrary meaning im- 
posed for want of expressive verbal terminations : The Committee of Alder- 
men invite proposals to Hone the prison vans. — Daily News. 



262 ANGLO-SAXON NOUNS. [Lect. xiy. 

and at least the participial adjective heartened may be considered 
as re-established.* 

Yerbs of this class are generally from Saxon roots. For the 
most part they refer to sensnons objects or material operations, 
and they are uniformly characterized by great directness and 
force of expression. We have, in some few cases, applied this 
process to nouns of foreign origin, as, for example, to station and 
to post a sentry, to provision a fortress, to girdle a tree, to preface 
an address, and Milton has " to syllable men's names "; but such 
cases are not frequent. 

The Anglo-Saxon nouns had a large number of characteristic 
endings, by which they were distinguished from other parts of 

* Gower made a noun of the verb will, 

But yet is nought my f est all plain, 
But all of woldes and of wisshes, &c. 

Conf. Am. Pauli, III. 32. 

Several examples of the use of to out as a verb will be found in Richardson. 
There is some confusion between this verb and the legal term to oust, which 
has been supposed to be from the French 6 1 e r (o s t e r), and oust may be but 
a Gallicized orthography of out. The word outing in the sense of excursion, 
journey, is now a common colloquialism, made familiar, perhaps, by Mrs. 
Whitney's Patience Strong's Outings. 

Foreigners and children often seize on the primitive analogies of language, 
and by an unconscious generalization employ forms o'f expression, which, 
though so nearly obsolete as to strike us as un-English, are nevertheless strictly 
idiomatic. Hence they constantly employ nouns for verbs, and few Americans 
have travelled in Europe without being asked by Continental servants ambi- 
tious of displaying their English, "Did you bell? " for " Did you ring? " Chil- 
dren will say " it winds," for " it blows," and in this instance they create, not 
revive, a Saxon verb, for neither the Anglo-Saxon nor the Scandinavian lan- 
guages possess a verb conjugate to the noun wind, and corresponding to the 
Moeso-Gothic v a i a n and the German w e h e n . 

In old English and Scottish popular poetry, ballads especially, my lane, or 
lone, Tier lone, are often used for / alone, she alone, &c. I lately heard a child 
of three years old say, on several different occasions : " Put me into the swing : 
I can't get up my lone." 

Alone, as well as the corresponding word in all the Gothic languages, is a 
compound of all and one, and it is altogether recent in origin, for it does not 
exist in Anglo-Saxon, Old-Northern, Mceso-Gothic, Old-High-German, or even 
Middle-High-German, though it is found in the modern representatives of all 
these dialects. Robert of Gloucester has at one, as " The Vortiger was al one," 
and Robert de Brunne, alone, at least according to the printed copies ; but, in 
general, the words were written separately, and syntactically connected with 



Lect. xiv.] CHARACTERISTIC ENDINGS. 263 

speech. Some of these probably were mere dialectic differences, 
but they were, no doubt, all originally significant of gender, 
quality, action, or state, though there are many of them to which 
no distinct force can now be assigned, even in the earliest forms 
in which the language has come down to us. In modern English 
these endings have, in great part, been dropped or transformed, 
or have lost their significance, and are no longer distinguishable 
as expressive elements of the noun. Some of them, however, are 
in active, though constantly diminishing use, and still retain their 

the objective of a personal or sometimes a possessive pronoun, until near the 
close of the fourteenth century. Thus Gower : 

But, for he may nought all Mm one 
In sundry places do justice, &c. 

Pauli's ed., III. 178. 

The king, which made mochel mone, 

Tho stood as who saith all Mm one 

Withoute wife, &c. Ibid., III. 285. 

All min one. Ibid., I. 45. 

Walking myn one. Piers Ploughman, 154. 

In the Harrowing of Hell, a religious poem written not far from the year 
1300, published by Halliwell, Dominus says to Satan : 

Ant thou shalt wyte wel to day 
That mine wolle y have away. 
Wen thou bilevest al thyn one, 
Thenne myht thou grede and grone. 

Halliwell renders the verse, "Wen thou bilevest al thyn one," "When thou 
hast none but thine own left." This Garnett contemptuously cites as an in- 
stance of the way in which Halliwell " can pervert the sense of the very plainest 
passages," and he explains the verse by ascribing to bilevest the sense of losest, 
renouncest, so that the meaning would be, " When thou losest all thine own," 
that is, all the souls of the patriarchs and prophets in the limbus patrum, who 
were released by Christ on his ascension, and whom Satan had claimed as his 
own. 

But Garnett's error is as gross as Halliwell's. Christ could not be supposed 
to admit that these souls were Satan's own, and the true meaning of the pas- 
sage is, when thou remainest alone, the limbus being left vacant by the rescue 
of the souls whom Christ carried up to Paradise. 

It is true that not much importance can be attached to the orthography of 
one, but I know no instance in which own is spelled one; and the sense of re- 
main continued to be sometimes ascribed to Mleve as late as the time of Chaucer. 
See Cant. T., 10897. 



264 ENDING IN -EE. [Lect. XIV. 

original power. Such, is the syllable -er, which we add to the in- 
finitive of verbs, and thus form verbal nouns signifying the agent 
or subject of the verb from which it is derived. Thus a rmmer 
is he who runs, a write?* he who writes. This ending, with more 
or less difference of orthography, is common to all the Scandi- 
navian, Teutonic, and Romance tongues, and the convenience, not 
to say the necessity, of such a form will probably keep it alive in 
all of them, in spite of the general effort of modern languages to 
free themselves from grammatical characteristics. The fact that 
it exists in all the sources from which our general vocabulary is 
drawn, commends it to us as an essential element of speech, and 
we apply it indiscriminately to verbal roots from whatever origin 
derived. Although I am much averse to orthographical novelties, 
yet I admit there is force in the arguments which have been 
urged for the spelling -er in preference to -or, even in words of 
Latin etymology, and I think we should gain both in uniformity 
and in expressiveness by the general adoption of the Saxon form. 
This termination was originally masculine exclusively, the cor- 
responding Anglo-Saxon feminine termination being -stre, as 
seamestre, still extant in the f orm seamster or semester. I 
find no positive evidence to show that the termination -ster was 
ever regarded as a distinctive feminine ending in English,* and 

* In Piers Ploughman, v. 434-7, we have this passage : 

■ B&ksteres and brewesteres 
And bochiers manye ; 
Wollen webbesters 
And weYeres of lynnen. 

There is nothing in the context which would authorize the inference that 
the ending in these words is indicative of sex, but at verse 2901-2, we read, 

My wif was a webbe 
And wollen cloth made : 

which gives some countenance to the supposition that the weaving of woollens 
was a feminine occupation, and therefore that webster meant a female weaver. 
Brewesters and baksters occur at verse 1514 of the same poem, but there is 
nothing in the period to indicate the sex, and the same remark applies to spyn- 
nesteres in verse 2003, and w&frestere in verse 3772. Wafrer is applied to a 
male seller of wafers in verse 8478, but regrater to an occupation exercised by 
a woman, in verse 2923 : 

Rose the regrater 

Was hire righte name. 

Halliwell says bakester is used in Derbyshire for a female baker, and he sup- 



Lect. xiv.] ENDING IN -STEE. 265 

I believe spinster is the only remaining word of this formation 
which is confined to the female sex. But here, the signification 
in which the word is now alone used, that of an unmarried woman, 
determines the gender, and the ending has no grammatical force. 
Besides the general tendency of English to the rejection of dis- 
tinctive forms, there was, in this case, a special reason for discard- 
ing an ending, which the introduction of so many foreign words 
with the same terminal syllable had made too ambiguous to serve 
any longer its original purpose. The number of English words 
in -ster, taken directly from foreign languages, or formed from 
roots ending in -st, is not less than one hundred, and most of these 

poses both bakester and brewster to be feminine in the passages cited from Piers 
Ploughman, but certainly without internal evidence. He also gives sewster as 
a feminine noun in the Somersetshire dialect, and cites the Promptorium Par- 
vulorum to the same purpose. 

Bycynistre is used by Chaucer in the Knightes Tale, v. 2813, and as it is ap- 
plied to the narrator of the tale, it was certainly masculine. Family names 
are usually, if not always, derived from the male ancestor, and Baxter, 
(bakester,) Brewster, and Webster, were therefore probably used as masculines 
at a very early period. 

In Wright's Yocab. An., Vol. I., pp. 181, 194, 232, textor, Lat., is denned 
as webster, Eng. In the same volume, Aelfric's Glossary, p. 34, pistor is ex- 
plained as, A. S. bacere; p. 83, as bcecestre; p. 93, as bakestre ; p. 194, pan- 
doxatrix is explained as bacstare, and on p. 200, brasiatrix, as brewster. 

Among the various readings in the Wycliffite versions, I find several in- 
stances of feminine nouns in -ster. They are, daunstere, Ecclus. ix. 4 ; dwelstere, 
Jer. xxi. 13 ; wilstere, Jer. ix. 17 ; sleestere, Tobit hi. 9 ; syngstere, II. Paral. 
xxxv. 25, and I. Esdras ii. 65, and, in one instance, in the text of Purvey's 
version, II. Kings xix. 35. With this last exception, the texts employ, 
daunseresse, dwelleresse, weileresse, sleeresse, and syngeresse, or woman-synger. 
Other remarkable feminines in these versions are, disciplisse, dewuresse, ser- 
vauntesse, and thrallesse. 

P. Ploughman, Vision, 3087, has ' ' Beton the brewestere," where the context 
shows it to be feminine, and v. 8683, "As a shepsteres shere," feminine also, 
shepstere not meaning a sheep-shearer, as Wright erroneously supposes, but a 
seamstress, as appears from Palsgrave, v. shepstarre, and Nares, v. shepster. 
Shepster is shapester, one who shapes, forms, or cuts out, linen garments. 

Tombestere, a female dancer, occurs more than once in Chaucer, and fruit- 
ester e, Cant. Tales, 12412, is apparently feminine. Minshew makes seamster 
feminine, and Ben Jonson, in the Sad Shepherd, II. 3, employs seio'ster as a 
feminine, but in a rustic dialect. On the other hand, we find in P. Plough- 
man, Vision, 4793, canonistres masculine. There is, then, no doubt that this 
termination was sometimes regarded as a feminine, but such does not appear 
ever to have been the general English usage. 
12 



266 ENDING OF NOUNS. [Lect. xiv. 

are either masculine or incapable of gender, while of Saxon words 
originally feminine with this ending, I believe that semester, 
songster, and spinster are the only ones still extant. Songster 
and sempster may be of either gender, although they are no doubt 
derivatives of the Saxon f eminines sangistre and seamestre, 
and not, as Webster strangely supposes, formed from the radical, 
and the root of the verb to steer* The fact that the termination 
-ess has been applied to both these words, to make them feminine, 
shows that the ending -ster was not considered as certainly indic- 
ative of gender. It is not used as a feminine sign in Layamon, 
in the Ormulum, or, as I believe, in Robert of Gloucester. We 
may therefore conclude that it is not to be regarded as having 
ever had any binding force in English grammar. 

The feminine ending -ess is an indirect derivative of the Latin 
termination -ix, but it has never been very freely used in English, 
and has been applied to few native radicals. Indeed, it has been 
dropped from many alien words to which it was formerly at- 
tached.f 

We still possess and employ, though with reluctance, the 
diminutive ending in -ling, as in gosling, nestling, nursling, in 
which last word the root is Romance, but the coincidence of this 
termination with that of the modern form of the active participle, 
and the number of verbal nouns derived from roots ending in 
-le, have nearly deprived it of its significance, and the Norman 
diminutive in -et has gradually supplanted it, even in words of 
Saxon origin. The endings in -dom, -hood and -ship are still em- 
ployed, but with constantly diminishing frequency, and the termi- 
nation in -ness, indicative of quality, and that in -er, of action, are 
the only Saxon finals which can be said to have fairly maintained 
their ground. The former of these, as well as the latter, we have 
applied to French and Latin roots without any feeling of incon- 
gruity, but the present course of the language is adverse to the 
formation of new words of this class, and of the fifteen hundred 
nouns ending in -ness contained in Walker's rhyming Dictionary, 
a very large number are already obsolete, if indeed ever authorized. 

* Webster's Dictionary, under songster. 

f Spousesse, cosinesse, and synneresse, occur in Wycliffe's New Testament, and 
saintess in Bishop Fisher's works. Fuller, Comment on Kuth, p. 104, has 
shee-saint. 



Lect. xiv.] ENGLISH PEEFIXES. 267 

The place of the obsolete and obsolescent Saxon nominal termi- 
nations has been in part supplied by Latin and French endings in 
-ty, -ion -ude, -ure, -ess, -ice, and -merit, but there is very gener- 
ally a reluctance to adapt these to Saxon roots, which much re- 
stricts the formation of nouns from other words. Betterment, 
much used by the best writers of the seventeenth century in the 
sense of improvement, growing, or making better, either in a 
moral or a physical sense, has nearly gone out of use, and is hardly 
employed except as a technical term in the jurisprudence of some 
of our States. Spenser's unruliment does not appear to have been 
much employed by other writers, if indeed not altogether peculiar 
to himself.* In the case of enlistment, we feel no such reluctance, 
and the reason is, that though we have the word list in Anglo- 
Saxon, in the sense of a border, yet list, a roll, whence our verb 
to enlist, is probably French, and we readily adjoin a French 
nominal ending to a verb of French etymology. We have more 
than three hundred English verbal nouns with the ending -ment, 
of which only fifteen or twenty are from Saxon roots, and the 
proportion of native nouns with other foreign endings is scarcely 
larger. Were all these Latin and French terminations as readily 
applicable to Saxon roots as are the Saxon endings to foreign radi- 
cals, we could hardly be said to have suffered a loss by the ex- 
change of one class for the other, inasmuch as the Gothic charac- 
teristic is not essentially more expressive than the Roman. But 
with respect to the prefixes applied to nouns the case seems to me 
otherwise. For instance, our inseparable prefixes mis and wan, 
which, until the invention of printing familiarized the English 
mind and ear with the prefixes of the classical languages, were 
applied to the noun and the adjective, as well as to the verb, had 
greater force of expression than any of the particles which have 
been introduced to supply their place. The negative or privative 
un-, was also formerly freely applied to nouns, as it is at this day 
in German, such words as an ungentleman, unnobleness, unhap, 
unkunnynge, (ignorance,) unpower, (impotence,) unright, and the 
like, often occurring in old writers. In words of Latin origin, 

* K e g a 1 or regul, a rule, occurs in Anglo-Saxon, as well as in most of 
the Gothic dialects, and therefore is no stranger to English ears, but whether 
it is a native or a borrowed word is a matter of much doubt. 



268 ABSTKACT NOUNS. [Lect. xiv. 

modern English generally substitutes non for the inseparable parti- 
cle un-, as non-conformity, though we still say unconformable 
strata* 

A curious mode of changing, extending, or restricting the sense 
of nouns, not indeed peculiar to English, is by ascribing different 
meanings to the singular and the plural. Thus in some com- 
munities, where social revolutions are frequent, where the low of 
one generation are the lofty of the next, and where at the same 
time there is so little of honest pride, that the son is ashamed of 
the paternal virtues to which he owes his own high position, it is 
very bad mannas to ask a gentleman, what was his father's call- 
ing, and yet the mann^ of putting the question may be wholly 
unexceptionable ; and on the other hand, one may scrupulously 
conform to every rule of good breeding, and therefore be entitled 
to the praise of good mannas, while the mann^ of every action 
may be ungraceful, or even almost ungracious. And when it was 
asked whether a wealthy lawyer had acquired his great riches by 
his practo'o?, there was a terrible satire in the answer : " Yes, by 
his pract^tf&s." 

The formation of abstract nouns from the adjective, or rather 
the use of the adjective itself as an abstract noun, is an important 
feature of many languages, but not suited to the genius of modern 
English, because the want of distinctions of gender in our adjec- 
tives makes all such expressions equivocal. "We do indeed, copy- 
ing from the Greek, use the adjective beautiful, in the form the 
beautiful, to express the quality or essence of beauty, but as the 
form of the adjective does not indicate number or gender, it is 
not in such phrases necessarily taken abstractly, as is to naXov in 
Greek. Nouns of this sort have a very peculiar force in languages 
which, like Greek and German, admit them, nor can their place 
be exactly supplied by any periphrase. The to koc\6v of the 
Greeks, the das Schone of the Germans, have no precise 
English equivalent, and the loss of the neuter adjective, and con- 
sequently of the abstract noun formed from it, in modern English, 
is a serious deficiency in our philosophical and critical vocabulary. 

* Trench employs unacquaintance, a hybrid authorized by good writers, 
though now little used. 

On the Auth. Version of the New Testament, chapter II. 



Lect. xiv.] THE ENGLISH ADJECTIVE. 269 

The only striking peculiarity of the English adjective, as com- 
pared with the same part of speech in other languages, is its in- 
variability, or its want of distinct forms for different cases, gen- 
ders, and numbers. The irreconcilability of the Norman and the 
Saxon modes of inflecting adjectives compelled the English to 
discard them both, but the Saxon endings of number especially 
were not given up until the fifteenth century, and some of them held 
out later. Hooker, who spells the adjective dear without an e in 
the singular, in using it as a plural noun, spells it deare, and says 
" my dear<? " for my dears, where a modern sermonizer would in- 
troduce a noun, and say " my dear hearers." Another remarka- 
ble form in a single instance survived almost as long. I refer to 
alder, or, sometimes and more properly alter, the genitive plural 
of the adjective all. Thus our alder father, our alter father, 
means father of us all ; alder or alter being properly an adjective, 
and oar used as a personal, not an adjective, pronoun in the gen- 
itive plural. Palsgrave very frequently, and indeed most usually, 
gives the adjective a plural form in s where it follows the noun, 
as verbs passives, verbs actyves personalles. 

There was, for a long time, an increasing inclination to reject 
the regular comparative and superlative degrees, and to substitute 
in all cases the comparison by more and most, a construction Nor- 
man in form, though the qualifying adverbs are Saxon. The 
prevalence of this latter method at the period in question was one 
of the fruits of that Gallic influence, which, during the early and 
latter part of the seventeenth century, so seriously threatened the 
literary and linguistic as well as the political nationality of Eng- 
land, but happily we have now returned to our native allegiance, 
and the legitimate and expressive Saxon inflection has recovered 
its lawful ascendency.* The rejection of the signs of case, gender, 

* We employ, in polysyllabic adjectives the inflected superlative more freely 
than the inflected comparative, for the reason that the ending er has a different 
significance when applied to nouns, and therefore an adjective compared by 
that ending might be confounded with a noun of like form. See Lecture vi. 

The following extract from a letter, written about 1470, shows a curious suc- 
cession of superlatives in both modes of comparison : ■' Ye most corteys gen- 
tylest wysest kyndest most companabyll freest largeest most bownteous 
knyght my Lord the Erie of Arran. * * * He is on the lyghtest delyuerst best 
spoken f ayrest Archer devowghtest most p' f yghte and trewest to hys Lady of 
all the Knyghtys that ever I was aqweyntyd wt."— Paston Letters, II. 96. 



270 THE ENGLISH VERB. [Lect. XIV. 

and number is attended with the common inconvenience of all our 
syntax, the necessity of assigning to the adjective, as well as to 
other words, a fixed position in the period ; bnt in point of force 
and precision of expression, little has been lost by discarding the 
inflections of this part of speech, and especially the superfluous 
distinction between the definite and the indefinite forms. 

The English verb, in common with that of the Germanic dia- 
lects, is distinguished from the Latin and Greek by the want of a 
passive voice and of future tenses, by the fewness of its past 
tenses, and by the admission of the letter-change as a mode of 
conjugation. I shall notice hereafter a tendency of early Eng- 
lish to the creation of new verbal forms,* but I have not detected 
any unequivocal trace of a rudimental passive, of the development 
of which the Swedish and Danish offer so interesting an example, 
or of a true future, for the occasional coalescence of will and shall 
with the verb to be, as wilbe and shalhe, is rather a matter of or- 
thographical and typographical convenience than a grammatical 
agglutination. It is a curious fact that the Romance languages, 
as well as the Romaic, at one period of their history, all rejected 
the ancient inflected futures, and formed new compound or aux- 
iliary ones, employing for that purpose the verbs will and shall, 
or have in the sense of duty or necessity, though French, Italian, 
Spanish, and Portuguese have now agglutinated the infinitive and 
auxiliary into a simple future. f "Why is it that the Gothic lan- 
guages have always possessed a past tense, never a future ? Why 
did the Romance dialects retain the Latin past forms, and reject 
the Latin future? A philological fact of so comprehensive a 
nature must have some common psychological ground, for we 
certainly cannot ascribe it to any external linguistic influence. 
It is perhaps not an absurd suggestion, that we may find the ex- 
planation in the habits of thought and feeling resulting from 
states of society, which had too little of the elements of stable 
security, steady progress, and seductive hope, to encourage much 
speculation as to what the morrow might bring forth. To our 
rude ancestors, and to the people of southern Europe in the mid- 
dle ages, the present was full of stern necessities ; the past, of hard 
and painfully impressed realities. The future offered but dim 

• 
* See Lecture xviii. f See Lecture xv. 



Lect. xiy.] THE ENGLISH VEKB. 271 

uncertainties, and hopeless anticipations. Hence they lived, not 
in a dream-land of the imagination to be realized in the good time 
coming, bnt in a now which demanded the exertion of their might- 
iest energies, or in &_past, whose actuality had stamped itself upon 
their inmost natures. The future was too doubtful to justify the 
employment of words implying prediction or even hope, and they 
appropriated to it forms indicative of a present purpose, determina- 
tion, or duty, not of prophecy or of expectation. 

The English verb is moreover distinguished from that of most 
other languages by the remarkable peculiarity of wanting charac- 
teristic radical forms. To this observation there are a few excep- 
tions. We have the Greek and French ending -ize, as in energize* 
the Latin -ate, as in create, and the Latin and French fy, as to 
fructify, to specify. But these are employed only with Greek, 
Latin, and French roots ; and such anomalous derivatives as Syl- 
vester's boundify and our American happify have met with little 
success, f so that these endings are rather to be considered as ele- 
ments of the imported word than as possessing a properly English 
significance. We have also the Saxon prefix he-, as to bedew, to 
beleaguer, generally applied only to verbal and nominal roots, 
though we sometimes verbalize an adjective by the aid of this 
prefix, as to besot, which is authorized by Milton and Shakespeare. 
But this formation is repugnant to the language, and nothing but 
the want of a good synonym has enabled Mr. Jefferson's verb to 
belittle to keep its place. The English verb, like that of most 
other languages, is, in the majority of cases, derived from a noun, 
and the want of a specific verbal form renders the transfer of a 
word from the class of nouns to that of verbs perfectly idiomatic 
and proper, though, as I have just remarked, we now rarely em- 
ploy that process. There is one important ending, however, by 
the aid of which we may convert adjectives into verbs. This is 
the ending -en, as to blackm. The resemblance between this form 
and the Saxon infinitive ending -an, naturally suggests the suppo- 
sition of their identity, and this view would seem to be confirmed 
by the fact that it is applied to Saxon radicals only, but grammari- 
ans generally consider the coincidence of sound accidental, and the 

* Rev. F. W. Robertson, in his Sermons, uses soberize. 

f Robertson uses happified. — Address to Working Man'3 Institute. 



272 THE ENGLISH VERB. [Lect. xrv. 

modern termination in -en, which is not the sign of a mood like 
the Saxon -an, but the characteristic of a part of speech, is re- 
garded as the development of a new grammatical form. A few 
verbs of this class, as lengthen, strengthen, heighten, are derived 
from nouns, the nonn being probably employed instead of the 
conjugate adjective for orthoepical reasons, but, in general, only 
adjectives expressing the sensuous qualities of objects at present 
admit of this change. In earlier stages of the language it was 
otherwise. In the Ormulum we find to gooden, to make good, 
also to benefit, and Milton and Southey employ the verb to worsen, 
to make or grow worse, but this has unhappily fallen into disuse.* 
The reason of this is doubtless to be found in the disposition 
which long prevailed to restrict the employment of Saxon words 
to the expression of the material and the sensuous, and to borrow 
the phraseology of moral and intellectual discourse from the 
Greek, the Latin, and the French. 

The English substantive verb, or that which expresses being, 
and which in most instances serves only as a copula to connect the 
subject and the predicate^ partakes of the irregularity which 
generally marks the conjugation of the corresponding verb in 
other languages. Its different parts are doubtless derived from 
different radicals, for he and am can hardly be supposed to be 

* In Wycliffe's time, the adjective was often used as a verb, without any 
change of form except such as was occasioned by the inflections then in use. 
Thus, Matthew xxiii. 12 : " Forsothe he that shal Mehjm self shal bemekid; 
and he that shal meeke hym self shal ben enhaunsid." And in Luke xiv. 11 : 
" And he that mekith him self, shal be highed." Wotton makes honest a verb, 
with no change but that of inflection. 

" The pretence, whereby a desperate discontented assassinate would after the 
perpetration have honested a meer private revenge." Reliquige, 1651, p. 34. 
The use of the passive form assassinate for assassin is also noticeable in this 
extract. 

Grower uses more and less as transitive verbs. 

What he woll make lasse, he lasseth, 
What he woll make more he moreth. 

Pauli's ed., III. 147. 
So that it mighte nought be mored. Ibid., 254. 

The verbs to less and to honest are both found in the older Wycliffite version, 
the former in Ecclus. xviii. 5, xix. 5, 7, where the later text has make lesse and 
made lesse; the latter in Ecclus. xi. 23. 

f See Sicard's (Jours d'instruction d'un Sourd-muet, 1800. 



Lect. xiv.] THE ENGLISH VERB. 273 

divergent forms of the same words. The Saxon weorthan, 
which corresponded to the German werden, to become, has un- 
fortunately become obsolete, and now survives only in the phrases : 
wo worth the day! wo worth the man ! and the like. Weor- 
than, though in some sort often an auxiliary, was not used as a 
sign of the passive, like the German werden, but generally 
retained its independent signification, and its disappearance is a 
real loss to the language.* 

In the opinion of the ablest linguists, English has lost nothing 
in force, variety, or precision of expression, by the simplification 
of its forms, and the substitution of determinatives for inflections. 
The present movement is still in the same direction. The sub- 
junctive is evidently passing out of use, and there is good reason 
to suppose that it will soon become obsolete altogether. The com- 
pound past infinitive also, formerly very frequent, is almost dis- 
used. Lord Berners says : should have aided to have destroyed, 
had made haste to have entered, and the like, and this was com- 
mon in colloquial usage until a very recent period. In cases of 
this sort, where the relations of time are clearly expressed by the 
first auxiliary, it is evident that nothing is gained by employing 
a second auxiliary to fix more precisely the category of the infini- 
tive, but where the simple inflected past tense precedes the infini- 
tive, there is sometimes ground for the employment of an auxili- 
ary with the latter. I intended to go and I intended to have gone, 
do not necessarily express precisely the same thing, but the latter 
form is not likely long to resist the present inclination to make 
the infinitive strictly aoristic, and such forms as I had intended to 
go will supersede the past tense of the latter mood. 

. * Weorthan, or worthen, is not unfrequent in early English. For example, 
in one of the old Prologues to the English Scriptures, Wyclimte Versions, I., 
p. 40, note, we find : 

" Alle gladnes and delite of this erthely vanyte vanyschith, and at the last 
worthith to nought." In fact this verb did not become altogether obsolete until 
the seventeenth century, for Heywood says : 

"Thou therefore that wast nothing before thou wert, &c, &c." "Thou, 
which icast not, wert made." " G-ive me a reason (if thou canst) how thou wert 
created." The Hierarchie of the blessed Angells, London, 1635, p. 383. 

In these cases, wert is not the subjunctive of the verb to be, but a remnant 
of worthen, and, in the last two, used as a passive auxiliary. 
12* 



LECTUEE XV. 

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS.* 



In considering the interjection, it was stated that words of that 
class were distinguished from all other parts of speech by the 
quality of inherent and complete significance, so that a single 
ejaculatory monosyllable, or phrase not syntactically connected 
with a period, might alone communicate a fact, or, in other words, 
stand for and express an entire proposition. The interjection 
might be involuntarily uttered, and impart a fact of a nature alto- 
gether subjective to the speaker, as, for example, that he was 
affected with sensations of physical pain or pleasure, with grief or 
with terror ; or it might assume a form more approximating to 
that of syntactic language, and address itself to an external object, 
as an expression of love, of pity, of hate or execration , of desire, 
command, or deprecation. 

The application of the distinction between interjections, as 
parts of speech, which, used singly and alone, may communicate 
a fact, a wish, or command, and therefore express an entire propo- 
sition, and parts of speech which become significant only by their 
connection with other vocables, is properly limited to the vocabu- 
lary of languages where, as in our own, words admit of little or 
no change of form, and to the simplest, least variable form of 
words in those other languages which express the grammatical re- 
lations, and certain other conditions of the parts of speech, by 
what is called inflection. 

I propose now to illustrate the distinction between inflected 

* The illustrations, and much of the argument, in this and the following lec- 
tures on the same subject, are too familiar to be instructive to educated persons, 
but I have introduced them, in the hope that those engaged in teaching lan- 
guages might derive some useful suggestions from them. 
(274) 



Lect. xv.] PUEPOSES OF INFLECTION. 275 

and uninflected, or grammatically variable and grammatically in- 
variable words, and to inquire into the essential character and use 
of inflections. Inflection is derived from the Latin f 1 e c t o , I 
bend, curve or turn, and inflections are the changes made in the 
forms of words, to indicate either their grammatical relations to 
other words in the same period, or some accidental condition of the 
thing expressed by the inflected word. The possible relations and 
conditions of words are very numerous, and some languages ex- 
press more, some fewer of them by the changes of form called 
inflections. Strictly speaking, inflections are changes of the sim- 
pler form to indicate grammatical category or syntactical relation. 
But the word is also applied to changes expressing logical distinc- 
tions, as grandis, grandior, &c. 

The languages which embody the general literature of Europe, 
ancient and modern, employ inflections for the following pur- 
poses: First, in nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and articles, to 
denote — 

(a) gender, 

(b) number, and 

(c) case, or grammatical relation. 

Secondly, in adjectives and adverbs, to mark degrees of compari- 
son. Thirdly, in adjectives, to indicate whether the word is used 
in a definite or an indefinite application. Fourthly, in verbs, to 
express number, person, voice, mood, and tense ; or, in other 
words, to determine whether the nominative case, the subject of the 
verb, is one or more, singular or plural ; whether the speaker, the 
person addressed, or still another, is the subject ; whether the 
state or action or emotion expressed by the verb is conceived of 
solely with reference to the subject, or as occasioned by an exter- 
nal agency ; whether that state, action, or emotion is absolute or 
conditional ; and whether it is past, present, or future."* 

* No single one of the languages to which I refer employs inflection for all 
the purposes I have specified. The Greek and Latin have the most complete, 
the English the most imperfect system of variation. The Icelandic, Swedish, 
and Danish exhibit the rare case of a modern passive voice, but, like the other 
tongues of the Gothic stock, they want the future tense ; and, on the other 
hand, they possess, in common with these latter, the definite and indefinite 
forms of the adjective, which existed also in Anglo-Saxon, but are not distin- 
guished in Greek and Latin. There may be some doubt whether this distinc 
tion is not rather a special exception than a general characteristic of the inflec- 



276 THE VERB OWE AND OUGHT. [Lect. xv. 

Interjections, prepositions, and conjunctions are uiiinflected, or 
invariable in form. 

The variations of the verb are usually the most numerous, and 
the uses and importance of inflections may be well illustrated by 
comparing an English uninflected with a Latin inflected verb. 

The English defective verb ought is the old preterite of the 
verb to owe, which was at an early period used as a sort of auxil- 
iary with the infinitive, implying the sense of necessity, just as 
we, and many of the Continental nations, now employ, have and 
its equivalents. / have much to do, in English ; J ' a i beau- 
coup a faire, in French ; Ichhabe viel zu thun,in 
German, all mean, substantially, there is much which I must do. 
Afterwards, by a common process in language, the general idea 
of necessity involved in this use of the word owe resolved it- 
self into two distinct senses : the one of pecuniary or other lia- 
bility in the nature of a debt, or the return of an equivalent for 
property, services, or favors received ; the other that of mor- 
al obligation, or at least of expediency. Different forms from 
the same root were now appropriated to the two senses, to owe, 
with a newly formed weak preterite, owed, being exclusively lim- 
ited to the notion of debt, and the simple form ought being em- 
ployed in all moods, tenses, numbers, and persons, to express moral 
obligation or expediency, or as an auxiliary verb. 

Before I proceed to illustrate the use of inflections by compar- 
ing the invariable ought with a Latin inflected verb of similar 
signification, I will pause to offer some further observations on 
the history of the verb to owe. This verb is derived from a Gothic 
radical signifying to have, to possess, or, as we now say, in another 
form of the same word, to own. Shakespeare very often uses 
owe in this sense, both in the present and the new or weak pret- 
erite form, owed / for the separation between the two forms owed 
and ought, though it commenced before Shakespeare's time, was 
not fully completed till a later period. Thus in Twelfth Night, 
at the close of the first act, these lines occur : 

Fate, show thy force : ourselves we do not owe ; 
"What is decreed must be, and be this so ! 

tional system which belongs to the cultivated languages of Europe, but the 
great importance of Scandinavian, German, and Anglo-Saxon literature enti- 
tle the peculiarities of Gothic grammar to a conspicuous place in all treatises 
upon modern and especially English.philology. 



Lect. xv.] THE VEEB OWE AND OUGHT. 277 

In like manner in the Tempest, I. 2 : 

Thou dost here usurp 
The name thou ow'st not. 

And in Macbeth, I. 4 : 

To throw away the dearest thing he ow'd, 
As 'twere a careless trifle. 

In these, and very many other cases, the sense is unmistakably to 
possess or own. In English grammar, the auxiliary verbs incline 
to be invariable, as must, will, shall / and ought, therefore, at last 
followed the same rule. But, for some time after the distinction 
between pecuniary and moral obligation, as expressed by different 
forms of this word, made itself felt, the present tense owe contin- 
ued to be occasionally employed for both j)urposes, such expres- 
sions as you owe to do this, being not unfrequent,* and on the 
other hand, ought was occasionally, though rarely, used in place 
of owed as late as the time of Dryden. The two phrases, you 
owe to do this, and you ought to do this, are so nearly alike in 
sound, that they would readily be confounded in pronunciation, 
and consequently in writing, and the difficulty of distinguishing 
between them facilitated the application of the rule that auxilia- 

* Thus, in one of the prologues to Wycliffe's translation of Clement's Har- 
mony, (Wycliffite Versions, I. xv.,) " Symple men oioen not dispute aboute 
holy writ * * but they oioen stedf astly bileue. " In this instance, the omission 
of the infinitive sign to is remarkable, as showing that owe, though conjugated, 
was regarded by the writer of the prologue as a true auxiliary, but this does 
not seem to have been the general contemporaneous practice. In the will of 
Louis Clifford, A. 1404, (Southey's Cid, 407,) we find, "all things which owen 
in such caas to be don." I believe Chaucer always uses the particle to before 
the infinitive in this construction, and the same rule is followed in the Apolo- 
gy for the Lollards ascribed to Wycliffe, as well as generally in the Wycliffite 
versions. 
So in Tyndale Math. iii. 14. "I owe for to be cristened of thee." 
In a proclamation of Henry III., A.D. 1258, given by Boucher from Henry's 
History of England, and often referred to as the earliest specimen of English, 
both senses of owe are exemplified. "And we heaten alle ure treowe, in the 
treowthe that heo us ogen." " And thaet aehc other helpe thset for to done bi 
tham ilche other, aganes alle men, in alle that heo ogt for to done." In this 
document, as printed after Pauli in Haupt's Zeitschrift, XI. 2, p. 298, the last 
clause quoted above reads : "rigt for to done and to foangen." 



278 USES OF INFLECTIONS OF VERBS. [Lect. xv. 

ries are invariable. * The introduction of a new grammatical form 
is always attended with much greater embarrassment than that of 
a new word, and the precise use of ought in a new combination 
did not at once become settled, for many old authors employed it 
as an impersonal, that is, as a verb without a nominative, though 
followed by an objective. Thus Chaucer and others say, us ought 
or oweth to do this, him ought or oweth to do that.f But not- 
withstanding some vacillation in the grammatical employment of 
ought, it was generally confined to the expression of mere moral 
or prudential obligation long before owe had lost its original sense 
of proprietorship.^: 

We will now, after a digression which I hope is not absolutely 
irrelevant to our subject, return to the inflections. 

Suppose that, in listening to an indistinct conversation, I catch, 
in a particular period, the word ought only. A vague sense of 
obligation is excited in my mind, but whether that obligation is 
confessed by the speaker as resting upon himself, singly, or in 
conjunction with others, or whether he refers to a duty incum- 
bent upon the friend or friends whom he is addressing, upon some 
third person, or some number of other persons ; whether he des- 
ignates the obligation as past, as now demanding performance, or 
as hereafter to accrue, absolutely or in some particular contin- 
gency ; upon none of these points does the form of the word I 

* Another instance where the employment of a particular word has been 
changed, to avoid the same confusion between the present and the past tense, 
may properly be noticed here. The verb to use, formerly served as a frequent- 
ative auxiliary in the present as well as the past, such phrases as "do use to 
chant it," " the lodging where you use to lie," being of very common occur- 
rence in Shakespeare, and contemporary as well as older writers. 1 use to and 
I used to are so nearly the same in articulation, that in ordinary speaking they 
could not be distinguished, and the present tense of use in this sense is there- 
fore almost entirely abandoned, the indicative present of the dependent verb 
supplying the place of the frequentative and infinitive. 

f " He is a japer and a gabber, and not veray repentant, that ef tsones doth 
thing for which him oweth to repent." Chaucer's Persones Tale. 

X It is a curious instance of the seeming caprices of language, that the Ger- 
man h a b e n and the French avoir, both cognate with the root of to owe, 
and like it, employed to express duty or obligation when used as auxiliaries, 
should in mercantile language have dropped the signification of debt, and 
contracted an opposite meaning, for h a b e n and avoir as opposed to soil 
and doit, both indicate, not the debit, but the credit side of the account. 



Lect. XT.] USES OF INFLECTIONS OF VERBS. 279 

have happened to hear give me any information whatever. For 
any thing that the form of the verb ought shows to the contrary, 
the speaker may have said, / ought, he ought, we onght, you 
onght, or they ought ; he may have referred to the present mo- 
ment, or any past or future time, as the period when the duty 
becomes obligatory; or he may have treated the duty as con- 
tingent or conditional altogether. Now, if the conversation had 
been carried on in Latin, no such uncertainty about number, 
person, time, or mood could have arisen, because the termination 
of the word corresponding to ought would, of itself, have resolved 
every one of these doubts. The moment the word was uttered, 
even without a pronoun or other nominative, I should have been 
informed whether the duty was charged upon the speaker ; upon 
one or more persons to whom, or one or more persons of whom 
he was speaking.; whether the time for the performance was past, 
present, or future ; and whether it was represented as an absolute 
or as a conditional obligation. To express all possible categories 
of the word ought, we have one form and no more ; and the con- 
text, the remainder of the sentence in which it occurs, the pro- 
noun or other nominative which precedes, and the infinitive which 
follows, must be called in to determine its multiplied relations of 
time, person, and condition. The equivalent of ought in Latin is 
a verb whose radical is conceived to be the monosyllable deb,* 
which still constitutes the first syllable in all the forms of the 
verb. In the infinitive mood, present tense, the form is d e b e r e , 
and this word admits of more than fifty inflections or changes of 
termination in the active voice alone, all so distinctly marked, 
that each one instantly suggests to the mind of the hearer the an- 
swer to every one of the points I have mentioned as left undeter- 
mined by the corresponding English verb ought, which expresses 
nothing but the naked fact of a duty affirmed to be absolutely or 
conditionally incumbent, at an uncertain time, upon an uncertain 
person or persons. 

* I speak of deb as the inflectional stem, not the etymological root of 
debeo. Debeois considered by some as a contraction of the compound 
de-habeo, I have from, that is, I have from another what still belongs to 
him, and, therefore, what I owe to him. The form dehabeo is used by St. 
Jerome as a negative of h a b e o , I have not, I want ; and the etymology I 
have just mentioned is rather too refined to be probable. 



280 INFLECTIONS OF ADJECTIVES. [Lect. xv. 

If the isolated word I have caught happen to be d e b e o , I 
know that the speaker acknowledges a present duty incumbent 
upon himself; had it been debuisti, I should have understood 
that reference was made to a past obligation of the person ad- 
dressed; ifdebebunt,toa future duty of more than one third 
person; if debuerimus, to a conditional duty of the'speaker 
and some other person or persons. All these forms are active, 
and make the person bound the subject of the period ; but the 
duty itself may be made the subject, and then an equally full set 
of passive inflections may be used, in some cases indeed with 
the aid of an auxiliary, to express substantially the same ideas.* 
This may be said to be an extreme case, because although hun- 
dreds of Latin verbs are as complete in their inflections as d e - 
b e r e , yet many are far less so, and on the other hand the Eng- 
lish example is a simple auxiliary, and as such little susceptible 
of inflection. This is indeed true, but it is a mere difference in 
degree. Our verbs generally, excluding the obsolescent second 
and third persons singular, in -est and -eth as \oYest, loYeth, have 
but three or four changes of form, and all the other categories are 
clumsily expressed by means of auxiliaries. 

In like manner, our adjectives admit no inflection whatever, 
except in the degrees of comparison. Thus the adjective beauti- 
ful is applied equally to persons of either sex, to the subject or 
the object of the verb, and to one or more persons, without any 
change of form. We say a beautiful boy or girl, beautiful boys 
or girls, whether the substantive to which it is applied be in the 
nominative, possessive, or objective case. In short, the adjective 
is, except in comparison, indeclinable, invariable, or uninflected, 
all of which terms are employed to express the same thing. The 
Latin adjective pulcher, meaning beautiful, has, on the con- 
trary, twelve different forms in the positive degree alone, and in 
the comparative and superlative twenty-two more, making thirty- 
four in all. 

Thus we say in Latin, in the nominative case, pulcher puer, 
a beautiful boy, pulchra puella, a beautiful girl ; in the geui- 



* We should perhaps not be able to find instances of the actual occurrence 
of debeo as expressive of obligation, in all the active and passive inflections, 
but such are grammatically and logically possible. 



Lect. xv.] INFLECTIONS OF ADJECTIVES. 281 

tive or possessive, pulchri pueri, flf a beautiful boy, pul- 
c h r ge puellse, of a, beautiful girl ; in the accusative, corre- 
sponding generally to the objective of English grammarians, 
pule brum puerum, a beautiful boy, pulchram puel- 
lam, a beautiful girl.* 

Some of these forms indeed are equivocal, the same inflection 
being used with different cases or genders, but nearly all of them 
clearly and certainly indicate the number, most of them the gram- 
matical relations, and many of them the gender of the noun to 
which the adjective is applied. Substantives also, admitting in 
English no change of form, except the indication of the genitive 
or possessive case and the plural number, go through a wide 
range of variation in Latin, every syntactical category having its 
appropriate form. Thus it will have been observed that in the 
examples I have cited, pulcher puer and pulchra puel- 
la, in every case the termination of the adjective and the noun 
is the same; pulcher puer, pulchri pueri, pulchrum 
puerum, pulchra puella, &c, but it is not necessary 
that the endings be alike. It suffices that particular endings be 
used together. There is another and more common form of the 
Latin adjective, in which the termination of the masculine nomi- 
native is not - e r , but -us. The adjective bonus, good, is an 
example of this, and if bonus were used with the same substan- 
tive puer in the nominative case, the phrase would stand bo- 
nus puer. Here the endings are not alike, but when the syl- 
lable -us is once accepted as one of the signs by which the mas- 
culine nominative is recognized, there is no difficulty in its use. 

In teaching Latin by that excellent method, the writing of 
themes, it is common to give the pupil the words of which he is 
to compose his periods in their simplest forms, leaving it to him 

* The Horatian verse : 

O m&tre pulchra fili* pulchiw / 

O fairer daughter of a fair mother ! or, 

O daughter fairer than [thy] fair mother ! 

is a good example of the superior gracefulness of expression in inflected lan- 
guages, but it is more equivocal than the English, for, though in this instance 
there is no logical difficulty in the construction, there is nevertheless a gram- 
matical uncertainty whether the lady addressed is compared with her mother, 
or the mother of some other person. 



282 INFLECTIONS OF NOUNS. [Lect. xv. 

to inflect them according to their intended relations. In this 
case, the words constitute no period, express no proposition, and 
are as meaningless as would "be a like number of English verbs, 
nouns, and adjectives, arranged without reference to grammatical 
relation, and unsupplied with the particles and auxiliaries which, 
in connection with certain laws of position, indicate to us cate- 
gories that, in other languages, are expressed by inflection. For 
instance, in the English phrase, sheep fear man, the words are 
all in their simplest, uninflected form, the form which, as we 
suppose, comes nearest to their primitive radical shape, but we 
have no difliculty in determining their relations to each other. 
"We know that sheep, which comes first in the proposition, is the 
subject or nominative of the Yerb fear, and that man, which fol- 
lows the verb, is its object or objective case. Now, if we take 
the corresponding Latin words in the simplest, most indefinite 
form in which they occur in that language, we have o v i s, t i - 
mere, homo; but this succession of words would convey to a 
Roman no meaning whatever, and in order to make it intelligible 
to him, we must begin with o v i s , the nominative singular of 
the Latin word for sheep, and transform it into o v e s , which is 
the regular nominative plural of that form of nouns ; t i m e r e , 
the infinitive corresponding to the English verb fear, must be 
changed into timent, which is the indicative present, third per- 
son plural of that verb, and homo, the nominative singular of 
the Latin word for man, into the accusative or objective h o mi- 
ne m, or the plural homines. The proposition would then 
stand, oves timent hominem, and as I shall show hereafter, 
the meaning would to a Roman be equally clear, and precisely 
the same, if the order of the words were reversed, hominem 
timent oves.* 

I have taken my illustrations from Latin, as a tongue more 
or less familiar to us all, but although, as compared with Enghsh, 
its system of inflection may be considered very complete, yet it is 
extremely meagre when measured by that of many other lan- 

* The case cited in the text is an example of the ordinary Latin construc- 
tion, but instances of much more artificial structure are frequent, for exam- 
ple : velim me facias certiorem proximis litteris Cn. Calpio Servilise Claudii 
pater vivone patre suo nauf ragio perierit an mortuo. Cicero, Epist. DXXXVI. 
(ad Att. XII. 20). 



Lect. xv.] VARIETY OF INFLECTIONS. 283 

guages. In Turkish, for example, a numerous class of verbs has, 
first, its simple, its reflective, and its reciprocal forms ; to each of 
these belongs a causative form, thus making six, all active and 
affirmative. Then comes the passive of each, giving us twelve, and 
every one of these twelve has, besides its affirmative form, a nega- 
tive and an impossible conjugation, so that we have thirty-six 
fundamental forms, each of which, in its different moods, tenses, 
numbers, and persons, admits of about one hundred inflections, 
thus giving to the verb three or four thousand distinctly marked 
expressive forms. But even this wide range of inflection by no 
means exhausts the possible number of variations indicative of 
grammatical relation, or other conditions of the verb, for, in some 
languages, there are duals, or verbal forms exclusively appropri- 
ated to the number two, and in others, the verb has special inflec- 
tions for the different genders. Again, in some tongues, there 
are forms expressive of iteration or repetition, called frequenta- 
tives, as from the Latin d i c o , I say, the frequentative d i c t i t o , 
in nursery English, I Jceep saying. There are also forms expres- 
sive of desire, as from the Latin e d o , I eat, e s u r i o , I desire 
to eat, I am hungry ; and of commencement, or tendency, as 
from the Latin caleo, I am warm, calesco, I grow warm; 
from s i 1 v a , a wood, silvescere, to run to wood, (of a vine 
plant ;) from arbor, a tree, arborescere, to become a tree.* 

In Spanish and Italian there are numerous terminations applied 
to substantives and adjectives, indicative of augmentation or 
diminution, affection or dislike, and these are sometimes piled one 
upon the other by way of superlative. Thus from the Italian 
a o m o , a man, we have omaccio, a lad man ; omacciuo, 
a very little man ; omaccione, a large, or sometimes a noole- 
minded man ; omacciotto, a mean little man ; o m e 1 1 o or 
omettolo, a small man; omiciatto or omiciattolo, 
an insignificant man.f 

* Fuller, who had a heroic contempt for all word-fetters, translates the h ae c 
planta in Judea arborescit of Grotius, by "hyssope doth tree it in 
Judea," Pisgah Sight of Palestine, I., 10, §8. 

f The admirers of Robert Browning — and what critic in the art of poetry is 
not among his admirers ? — will remember that in the soliloquy of Dominus 
Hyacinthus de Archangelis, Pauperum Procurator, in the third volume of The 
Ring and the Book, he gives the name of his little son Giacinto or Hyacinthe 



284 VAEIETT OF INFLECTIONS. [Lect. XV. 

"Words of this class, indeed, as well as some of the verbal forms 
I have cited, may be said to be derivative rather than inflections, 
because they express qualities or accidents, not syntactical rela- 
tions or conditions, and belong therefore to the domain of logic, 
not properly to that of grammar, except simply so far as the whole 
history of words belongs to grammar. It appears to me, neverthe- 
less, that all regular changes of words may be called inflections, 
and the power of modifying vocables by such changes is as charac- 
teristic of different languages as the variations of termination or 
of radical vowel, which are generally embraced in that designation. 

The speech of the Spanish Basques, one of those rare sporadic, 
or as they have been sometimes called, insular languages, which 
long maintain themselves in the midst of unallied tongues and 
hostile influences, appears to be unsurpassed, if not unequalled, in 
variety of inflection. Thus all the parts of speech, including 
prepositions, conjugations, interjections, and other particles, admit 
of declension. There are six nominative forms and twelve cases 
of the noun. The adjective has twenty cases. Every Romance 
verb is represented in Basque by twenty-six radical forms, each 
with a great number of inflections ; and different modes of conju- 
gation are employed in addressing a child, a woman, an equal or 
a superior.* 

in at least seventeen different forms, all what the Italians call vezzeggiativi or 
pet names ; and Fanf ani, Voci e maniere del parlar Fiorentino, gives us the 
following variations on the theme donna : 

Bonne, donnone, donnotte, donnette, 

Donnucce, donnellucce, e donnelline, 

Donniccion, donnicin, donniceiolette, 

Donnelle, donnarelle, donnarine, 

Donnaccie, donnellaccte, e donnellette, 

Donnine, donniccuol, donniccioline, 

E donnicciacce 

When the present beautiful and accomplished Queen of Italy visited Naples 
some years since, as Crown Princess, the populace who followed her carriage 
expressed their admiration of her by cries of "oh, che bella ! e che simpaticona /" 
and when an Italian conservative paper taunted the Garibaldians with the in- 
significant effect produced on the mind of the English public by the hero's 
visit to England in 1866, a liberal contemporary journal replied by magnify- 
ing that effect, and said, " ne siamo contenti, contentoni, contentinoni." It can- 
not be pretended that all these forms are distinctively significant, but very 
many of them are so, at least locally, and they are used with great effect 
especially in light literature and in conversation. 
* Quatref ages, Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste. 



Lect. xv.] VAEIETY OF INFLECTIONS. 285 

Thus far we have spoken of simple words only, and their regu- 
lar derivatives ; but if they be compounded, still more complex 
ideas may be conveyed, and finally, in some languages, by the 
process to which we have before referred, called agglutination, 
but not always distinguishable from more familiar modes of com- 
position, or even from inflection, several words may be compressed 
into one, and thus a single verb may of itself stand for a whole 
sentence, expressing at once the subject, the copula, the object, 
as well as numerous predicates or qualifications of all of them. 

"Not only the objects, but the methods, of inflection are very 
various in different tongues, and a single language often avails 
itself of more than one of them. It may be stated that there are 
two leading modes of variation, both sufficiently exemplified in 
English, the one consisting in a change of some of the elements, 
usually vowels, of the root-form, the other in prefixing or sub- 
joining additional syllables, or at least vocal elements, to the radi- 
cal. Of the first sort, the letter-change, our verb to ride is ah ex- 
ample, the diphthongal long i of the root being changed into o 
in the preterite rode, and into simple short i in the participle 
ridden. So run, ran / write, wrote, (in Old English wrote,) writ- 
ten / fly, flew, and so forth. In like manner man makes men, in 
the plural, foot, feet / goose, geese / and the like. The Scandina- 
vian and Teutonic languages, which are so clearly allied to Eng- 
lish both in grammar and in vocabulary, much affect the letter- 
change, and we find in all of them, as well as in Anglo-Saxon, 
traces of a much more extensive use of this principle at some 
earlier period of linguistic development. For instance, in all these 
languages the verb had probably once a regular causative form, 
consisting in a vowel-change, and it is curious that the remains of 
this form should be found at this day in the same roots of each of 
them. Thus, the neuter verb to fall has its causative to fell, that 
is to cause to fall, as to fell a tree with an axe, to fell a man by a 
blow ; the neuter to lie, its causative to lay, to make to lie, or 
place ; and the neuter to sit, its causative to set, in several differ- 
ent applications. These same neuters, with their respective causa- 
tives, exist in Danish, Swedish and German, as well as in English. 
The resemblance in their forms leads occasionally to confusion in 
their use. The causative to set, in its different acceptations, is a 
sad stumbling-block to persons who are not strong in their acci- 



286 MODES OF INFLECTION. [Lect. xv. 

dence, and to lie and to lay are so frequently confounded, that 
even Byron, in his magnificent apostrophe to the Ocean, was guilty 
of writing " there let him lay." * Neither the English nor the 
other languages of the Gothic stock now do, nor, so far as we are 
able to follow them back historically, ever did, exclude inflection 
by the mode of addition of letters or syllables, and the two meth- 
ods of conjugation and declension appear to have co-existed from 
a very remote period. Although, therefore, we inflect many Saxon 
primitives by augmentation, yet we confine the letter-change 
almost wholly to words of that stock, and we generally, if not 
always, inflect Latin and other foreign roots by augmentation. 
Thus the verb to amend, which we derive from the Latin through 
the French, forms its preterite amende by the addition of the 
syllable -ed to the simple form. The Latin-English noun posses- 
sion makes its plural by subjoining s, possessions. We still use 
prefixes largely in composition, but as a flectional element, although 
they were a good deal employed in Anglo-Saxon, they must now 
be considered obsolete. The syllabic prefix g e - , regularly used 
in Anglo-Saxon with preterites and often with past participles as 
well as in many other cases, long retained its ground, and is yet 
sometimes employed in the archaic style of poetry, in the form of 
a y or ye, which, in our orthography, nearly represents the proba- 
ble pronunciation of the Saxon augment. Spenser uses this aug- 
ment very frequently, and Thomson often employs it in the 
Castle of Indolence, both of them merely for metrical con- 
venience, f 

* The old poem of Kyng Alisaunder has lie for lay : 
So on the schyngil lyth the haile, 
Every knyght so laide on other. 2210-2211. 

f In Milton it occurs but thrice, and in some of these three instances it is 
applied in a very unusual way. In the first printed of Milton's poetical com- 
positions, the Epitaph on Shakespeare, we find the lines : 

What needs my Shakespeare, for his honor'd bones, 
The labor of an age in piled stones ? 
Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid, 
Under a star-2/ pointing pyramid ? 

Here the syllabic augment y- is prefixed to a present participle, a form of which 
there are very few examples, though ilestinde, y- lasting, or permanent, occurs 
in the proclamation of King Henry III. , referred to in a note on page 322. 
The prefix is rarely applied to any but Saxon radicals, and thus y -pointing is a 



LECT. XV.] MODES OF INFLECTION. 287 

Of these two leading modes of variation, the former, wliich 
consists in a change of letter in the radical form, is called the 
strong, the latter, consisting in the addition of vocal elements to 
the root, the weak inflection. The principle on which this no- 
menclature is founded is that the power of varying a "word by 
change of its more unessential constituents, without external aid 
in the way of composition or addition of syllables, implies a cer- 
tain vitality, a certain innate, organic strength not possessed by 
roots capable of variation only by the incorporation or addition of 
foreign elements. The weak inflection is the regular, the strong, 
the irregular form of the older grammarians, but according to the 
theory now in vogue, the strong is the more ancient and regular 
of the two modes of inflection, and the terms ought to be re- 
versed. The suffrage of children, who are acute philologists, and 
extremely apt in seizing the analogies of language, and therefore 
credible witnesses, is in favor of the regularity and linguistic 
propriety of the weak inflection. They say I runned, I rided, 
and the like, and Cobbett, an unlearned, indeed, but excellent 
practical grammarian, as well as some better instructed philolo- 
gists, have seriously proposed to reform our grammar by reject- 
ing the strong preterites and participles, and inflecting all verbs 
according to the regular or weak method.* 

double departure from the English idiom. T-pointed, indeed, is found in Robert 
of Gloucester, and it is possible that Milton wrote y-pointed, in which case the 
meaning would be pointed or surmounted with a star, like some of the Egyptian 
obelisks which have received this decoration since they were transferred to 
Europe, instead of pointing to the stars. In Dr. Masson's ed. of Milton's Poeti- 
cal Works, 1874, this word is printed thus : star-ypointing. Igretinge occurs 
in the Proclamation of Edward II., A.D. 1250. 

It is not here inappropriate to remark that the expletive ywiss often written 
1 wiss, as if it were two words, and understood to be the first person indicative 
present of an obsolete verb to wiss, to teach, direct, or affirm, with the pronoun 
of the first person, is only the Anglo-Saxon form of an adverb derived from a 
participle, and corresponding exactly to the German gewiss, meaning 
surely, certainly. The erroneous explanation above alluded to is sometimes 
found where one would hardly expect to meet it, as, for instance, in the Glos- 
sary to Scott's edition of Sir Tristram. 

* The tendency of modern English to the more extended use of the weak 
inflection is happily so powerful, that unless it be checked by increased fami- 
liarity with our earlier literature, it is not improbable that the strong declen- 
sions and conjugations will disappear altogether. A comparison of the mod- 
ern poets with Chaucer, and even much later writers, will show that hundreds 



288 STKONG AND WEAK INFLECTIONS. [Lect. xv. 

But whatever may be thought of the relative antiquity of the 
forms, the notion on which the new nomenclature rests is a fanci- 
ful one, and it is unfortunate that terms so inappropriate should 
have been sanctioned by so high authority, and so generally 
adopted by grammarians. Had the two modes been called, re- 
spectively, old and new, the names would have expressed a his- 
torical fact, or at least a probable theory, but it would be easy to 
assign as sound and as obvious reasons for designating the two 
classes of variation by ascribing to them color or weight, and for 
calling them black and white, or heavy and light, as those alleged 
for the use of the terms strong and weak. It certainly could not 
have been difficult to invent appellations more appropriate in 
character, and it is to be regretted that the difficulties of gram- 
matical science should be augmented by increasing the number of 
fallacious terms in its vocabulary. 

Yarious theories have been suggested to explain the origin of 
the changes of form in different classes of words in inflected lan- 
guages. These I cannot here discuss or even detail. It must 
suffice to observe that, with respect to the strong inflections, or 
those consisting in a letter-change, as, present run, past ran, sin- 
gular man, plural men, it is at least a plausible supposition, that 
they originated in different pronunciations of the same word in 
different local dialects, the respective pronunciations each assum- 
ing a distinct significance, as the dialects melted into one speech. 
As to the weak inflections, those consisting in the addition of vo- 
cal elements, it has been conjectured that these elements were in 
all cases originally pronouns, auxiliaries or particles which have 
coalesced with the verb or other root. In general the inflections 
were adopted so early, and the pronouns or other absorbed words 
have become so much modified, that they can no longer be recog- 
nized in their combination with the inflected word. But there 

of verbs f ormerly -inflected with the letter-change, are now conjugated by aug- 
mentation. Every new English dictionary diminishes the number of irregular 
verbs. Webster tells us that swollen, as the participle of swell, is now nearly 
obsolete. Popular speech, however, still preserves this form, as well as many 
other genuine old preterites and participles, which are no longer employed in 
written English. Even heat, (pronounced het,) now a gross vulgarism, occurs 
as the participle of to heat, as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century. 
See Holland's Pliny, II., 393, and Daniel III., 19, in the original edition of the 
standard translation of the Bible. 



Lect. xy.j okigin of inflections. 289 

are some instances where we possess historical evidence of snch 
a coalescence. The future of the verb in all the Romance lan- 
guages is a case of this sort. Thus am are, amar as, amar a, 
the future of the Spanish verb amar, is simply amar he, I 
have to love; amar has, thou hast to love; amar ha, he 
has to love.* In the closely allied Portuguese, the constituents 
of the future may still be used separately, and even an oblique 
case inserted between them ; as dar-lhe-hei, I will give him, 
agastar-se-ha, he will be angry. This was also common in 
old Castilian, and we find in Beuter such combinations as c a s t i - 
garosemos, evidently os hemos de castigar, we will 
punish you. The formation of many of the other tenses may 
readily be traced in the older literature of other Peninsular dia- 
lects. Thus we find in the Catalan of King Jaume,f the first 
person plural of the conditional, with an oblique case, here a 
dative, inserted ; nos donar los niem co q valien, we 
would pay them for them [the horses] what they were worth. 

There is a more interesting example of a newly formed inflec- 
tion in languages cognate with our own, and I shall point out 
other remarkable instances of a tendency in the same direction, in 
discussing the Old-English inflections.^: The Icelandic has a re- 
flective form of the verb, used also as a passive, the characteristic 

* The Mceso-Grothic verb haban, to have, was used as & future auxiliary, 
not as a past. Thus, in John xii. 26 : " jah parei im ik, f>aruh sa andbahts 
meins visan habaip," and where I am, there my servant shall be ; And 
when used in the past tense, it still involved the future corresponding to the 
would and should of the English Bible in a similar construction, as in John vi. 
6: "ip silba vissa, patei habaida taujan," for he himself knew what he 
would do ; and John vi. 71 : " Quapuh pan pana iudan seimonis iskariotu sa 
auk habaida ina galevjan." He spake of Judas Iscariot the son of Simon ; 
for he it was that should betray him. 

f Conquesta de Valencia por lo serenissim e catholich princep do Jaume, 
Valencia, 1515. 

In the Chronicle of Don Pero Nino, p. 56, we find the complicated combi- 
nation, facer nos la han dej ar , they will make us abandon it. 

The compound tenses were sometimes used in Italian down to the end of the 
fifteenth century. Savonarola generally employs the inflected future, but in a 
sermon delivered " adi VIII. di giugno, m.cccc.lxxxxv," p. 12, he has: "e 
dicoti che se idio ha premiare huomini almondo ha premiare gli chris- 
tian^ " etc. 

± See Lecture xviii. 
13 



290 ORIGIN OF INFLECTIONS. [Lect. XV. 

of which is the consonantal ending s t or z : thus the active in- 
finitive at kalla, to call, makes the reflective kallast or 
k a 1 1 a z . This was anciently written s e or s k instead of s t , 
and there is no doubt that it was originally simply a contraction 
of the reflective pronoun sik, corresponding to our self, or more 
exactly to the French reflective se, so that at kallast was 
equivalent to, to call oriels self, or the French s'appeler. The 
form in question was at first purely reflective. It gradually as- 
sumed a passive force, and there are a few instances of its employ- 
ment as such by classic writers in the best ages of that literature.* 
In modern Swedish and Danish, it is a true passive. I dwell 
upon this philological fact the more, because it is one of the few 
cases where we can show the origin of an inflection, and it is also 
specially interesting as an instance of the recent development of 
a passive conjugation in a language belonging to a family, which, 
in common with most modern European tongues, has rejected the 
passive form altogether, f Although the theories I have men- 
tioned serve to furnish an explanation of many cases of both weak 
and strong inflection, there are numerous flectional phenomena 
which they fail to account for. "We must seek the rationale of 
these in more recondite principles, or, in the present state of 
philological knowledge, confess our inability to propose a solution, 
and we are sometimes tempted to maintain with Becker, that lan- 
guage, as an organism, has its laws of development and growth, 
by virtue of which the addition of vocal elements to the root is 
as purely a natural germination as the sprouting of a bud at the 
end of a stem or in the axilla of a leaf. Eo theory of agglutina- 

* Eigi nmnu ver pat gera, segir SkarpheSinn pviat fast mun annat til elld 
kveykna, Njala, C. 125. Eigi muni fast slikr kostr ; Fornmanna Sogur III. 
73, RauSgrani sdst pa ekki. Forn. Sog. NorS. II., 244. 

f The want of passive forms is a serious defect in the grammar of modern 
European languages, and many of them have resorted to singular devices to 
supply their place. Thus in Italian, " da dare a mutuo lire dieci mila mediante 
ipoteca mora ed interresse concertandi." Newspaper Advertisement. 

"I monumenti onde qui si tratta f urono comminciati a scoprirsi nel 1848, 
* * una forma che ne f urono potuti raccogliere parecchi," etc. Newspaper 
Article. 

In old Spanish, pagadero (sometimes pag a d or and hacedero), and 
in old Catalan, pag ado r , were used with a gerundial and passive significa- 
tion. 



Lect. xv.] OKIGLN OF INFLECTIONS. 291 

tion or coalescence will explain the general resemblance of the 
genitive singular to the nominative plural in English nouns, and 
the like coincidence between the same cases in the masculine and 
feminine genders of Latin substantives and adjectives. The 
characteristic endings of the genders, and the identity of form be- 
tween the nominative, accusative, and vocative cases in the neuter 
gender of adjectives and substantives in both Greek and Latin are 
peculiarities of an equally obscure character.* Linguistics, as a 

* Archbishop "Whately makes the following suggestion in his annotation on 
Lord Bacon's sixteenth essay : 

" In that phenomenon in language, that both in the Greek and Latin, nouns 
of the neuter gender, denoting tilings, invariably had the nominative and the 
accusative the same, or rather had an accusative only, employed as a nomina- 
tive when required, — may there not be traced an indistinct consciousness of the 
persuasion that a mere thing is not capable of being an agent, which a person 
only can really be ; and that the possession of power, strictly so called, by 
physical causes, is not conceivable, or their capacity to maintain, any more 
than to produce at first, the system of the universe ? — whose continued exist- 
ence, as well as its origin, seems to depend on the continued operation of the 
great Creator. May there not be in this an admission that the laws of nature 
presuppose an agent, and are incapable of being the cause of their own observ- 
ance ? " 

It is with diffidence that I venture any criticism on so profound a thinker 
and so accurate a writer as the distinguished scholar from whom I quote, but 
it appears to me that this view of the case supposes grammatical gender to be 
essentially indicative of sex, that sex is a necessary attribute of all personality, 
including that of the Deity, and that want of sex distinguishes the thing from 
the person. The Greeks as well as the Latins, generally at least, employed 
gender as a mere grammatical sign, for the names of thousands of things in 
both languages, are masculine and feminine, and on the other hand beings are 
in very many cases designated by words of the neuter gender. The words of 
this latter class, it is true, are generally derivatives, diminutives, and the like, 
but I am aware of no reason to suppose that in any stage of the Greek or Latin, 
whatever may have been the case in the older tongues from which they are 
derived, the masculine and feminine forms alone were capable of expressing 
personality. The neuter adjective, to Qelov is used absolutely for the Divine 
Being or Essence, by Herodotus and by iEschylus. The chorus in the Aga- 
memnon applies it to the inspiration of the Divinity. 

1083, X0. xPW ecv soinev djucpc tuv dvTrjg mK&v, 
[level to Qelov dovA'ta rcapbv <j>pevi; 

and it occurs in the sense of Divine control in the Choephori, v. 956, 

KpaTeiTai ttuq to Qelov napa to jirj 
virovpyelv Kanolg. 

As a proof that the Latin grammarians did not attach the notion of sexuality 



292 OBIGIN OF INFLECTIONS. [Lect. XV. 

science, is still in its infancy, and its accumulation of facts is but 
just begun. "We shall doubtless hereafter penetrate much deeper 
into the mysteries of language, but yet we must resign ourselves 
to the conclusion, that speech, like other branches of human in- 
quiry, will be found to have its ultimate facts, the detection of 
whose causative principles is beyond our reach. 

to grammatical gender, see Yarro, quoted in Andrews under genus. The use 
of genus instead of sexus shows this. 

Pellissier, in his La Langue Francaise, p. 152, says : "Le genre neutre dis- 
parait dans le vieux f rancais, sans grand prejudice litteraire et avec un grand 
avantage de precision et de simplicite pour la pratique." 

In German Mannchen is used for the male, and Weibchen for the female of 
the lower animals. 






LECTUEE XVI. 

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS. 

n. 

The general principle which the philological facts stated in the 
last lecture serve to illustrate, is, that in fully inflected languages 
like the Latin, the grammatical relations, as well as many other 
conditions of words, are indicated by their form; in languages 
with few inflections, like English, by their positions in the period, 
and by the aid of certain small words called auxiliaries and parti- 
cles, themselves insignificant, but serving to point out the connec- 
tion between other words. In the proposition which was taken 
as an example, sheep fear man, oves timent hominem, 
the English words were each employed in the simplest form in 
which they exist in the language, without any variation for case, 
number, or person, whereas in the corresponding Latin phrase, 
every word was varied from the radical, or inflected, according to 
its grammatical relations to other words in the period. Hence, it 
will be seen that for determining the relations between the con- 
stituents of a Latin period, the attention is first drawn to the in- 
flected syllables of the words, and only secondarily to their im- 
port. These syllables may be called the mechanical part of gram- 
mar, because, though they probably once had an intelligible sig- 
nificance in themselves, yet that had been lost before Roman 
literature had a being, and so far back as we can trace the lan- 
guage, they were always, as they now are, mere signs of external 
relations and accidental conditions of the words to which they are 
applied. "When the first inflected word in a Latin sentence is ut- 
tered, its relations to the entire proposition are approximately 
known by its ending, its ear-mark ; and the mind of the listener 
is next occupied in sorting out of the words that follow, another, 
whose termination tallies with that of the first ; the process is re- 

(288* 



294 ARRANGEMENT OF PERIOD. [Lect. xvi. 

peated with the second, and so on to the end of the period, the 
sense being often absolutely suspended until you arriv r e at the 
key-word, which may be the last in the whole sentence. We may 
illustrate the mental process thus gone through, by imagining the 
words composing an English sentence to be numbered one, two, 
three, and so on, but to be pronounced or written promiscuously, 
without any regard to the English rules of position and succes- 
sion. Let it be agreed that the nominative, or subject of the 
verb, shall be marked one, the verb two, and the objective case, or 
object of the verb, three. Thus, William 1, struck 2, Peter 3. 
It is evident that if we once become perfectly familiar with the 
application of the numbers, so that one instantly suggests to us 
the grammatical notion of the subject or nominative, two that of 
the verb, and three that of the object or objective, the numeral 
being in every case the sign of the grammatical category, the po- 
sition of the words becomes unimportant, and it is indifferent 
whether I say William 1, struck 2, Peter 3, or Peter 3, struck 2, 
William 1. The subject, the verb, and the object remain the 
same in both forms, and the meaning of course must be the same. 
English-speaking persons, in practising such lessons, would at first, 
no doubt, mentally rearrange the period, by placing the words in 
the order of their numbers, according to the law of English syn- 
tax, just as we do in construing or beginning to read a foreign 
language with a syntactical system different from our own. This, 
in long sentences, would be very inconvenient, because the words 
and their numbers must be retained in the memory until the sen- 
tence is completely spoken or read through, and then arranged 
afterwards; but practice of this sort would be found a useful 
grammatical exercise, and at the same time would facilitate the 
comprehension of the syntactical principles of languages, where 
the meaning of the period is not determined by position. This 
method of illustrating the principles of syntactical arrangement 
may seem fanciful, but nevertheless numbers have been employed 
by very high English authority, in actual literary composition, as 
a means of marking grammatical relation. Sir Philip Sidney, in 
the third book of the Arcadia, introduces a sonnet " with some art 
curiously written," in which the words are arranged chiefly ac- 
cording to metrical convenience ; but their relations indicated by 
numbers printed over each word. There is, however, a difference 



Lect. xyt.] AEEA1STGEMENT OF PEEIODS. 295 

between his system of numeration and that which I have used in 
the example just given. He applies the same number to all the 
words composing each separate member of the period, because, 
in a long proposition containing many members, the numbers 
would be difficult to retain, if running on consecutively. Thus, 
the nominative, the verb, the objective, and the adverbial phrase 
of qualification, composing the first member, are all marked one ; 
the same elements of the second member all marked two, and so 
of the rest. The sonnet is as follows : 

12 3 12 3 

Vertue, beautie, and speech, did strike, wound, charme, 

12 3 1 2 3 

My heart, eyes, eares, with wonder, love, delight, 

12 3 12 3 

First, second, last, did binde, enforce, and arme 

12 3 12 3 

His works, shews, suits, with wit, grace, and vows' might. 

1 2 3 12 3 

Thus honour, liking, trust, much, farre, and deepe, 

12 3 12 3 

Held, pierc't, posses't, my judgment, sense and will, 

1 2 3 12 3 

Till wrong, contempt, deceit, did grow, steale, creepe, 

12 3 12 3 

Bands, favour, faith, to breake, defile, and kill. 

1 2 3 12 3 

Then griefe, unkindnesse, proofe, tooke, kindled, thought, 

1 2 3 12 3 

Well grounded, noble, due, spite, rage, disdaine, 

12 3 12 3 

But, ah, alas, (in vaine) my minde, sight, thought, 

1 2 3 12 3 

Doth him, his face, his words, leave, shun, refraine. 

12 3 12 3 

For no thing, time, nor place, can loose, quench, ease, 

1 2 3 12 3 

Mine owne, embraced, sought, knot, fire, disease. 

The first four verses transposed according to the rules of English 
syntax would read thus : 

i ill 

1 Vertue did strike my heart with wonder, 

2 2 2 2 

2 Beautie " wound " eyes " love, 

3 3 3 3 

3 And speech " charme" eares " delight. 



296 LATIN INFLECTIONS. [Lect. xvi. 

1111 

1 The first did bind his works with wit, 

2 2 2 2 

2 " second, " enforce " shews " grace, 

3 3 3 3 

3 And " last " arme " suits " vows' might. 

A like example occurs in some complimentary verses addressed 
by Edward Ingham to the celebrated John Smith, and printed in 
Smith's History of Virginia : 

12 3 12 3 

Truth, travayle, and neglect, pure, painefull, most unkinde, 

12 3 12 3 

Doth prove, consume, dismay, the soule, the corps,* the minde. 

Again, we may suppose, that instead of numbering the words 
according to their order in English syntax, the subject, verb, and 
object are respectively distinguished by the letters of the alpha- 
bet, &, h, e. It is evident that in this case also, the position of 
the words might be varied at pleasure without affecting the 
sense. Or, to come at once to the actual fact, as it exists in 
many languages, let us agree that the nominative case of all 
nouns of the masculine gender shall end in the syllable -us, 

* Southey, who was very well read in early English literature, appears to 
have overlooked the fact that corps was, not unfrequently, used for body of a 
living person in the seventeenth century. In a note on p. 407 of the Chronicle 
of the Cid, upon the word " Carrion," he says : " In the translation of Riche- 
ome's Pilgrim of Loreto by G-. W., printed at Paris, 1630, a similar word is 
employed, but not designedly, * * * the translator living in a foreign country, 
and speaking a foreign language, had forgotten the nicer distinctions of his 
own. " ' ' Women and maids, " he says, ' ' shall particularly examine themselves 
about the vanity of their apparell, * * * of their too much care of their 
corps," &c. 

Spenser uses this word for living body : 

" A comely corpse with beautie faire endowed." 

Hymne in Honour of Beautie, p. 135. 

Fuller, in Andronicus, or the Unfortunate Politician, iii., 18, uses corps, a 
dead body, as a plural: "As for the corps of Alexius * * * they were 
most unworthily handled," &c. And again, in his Church History of Eng- 
land, Book X., Sec. I., § 12, speaking of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth he 
says : " Her corps were solemnly interred under a fair tomb," &c. But at the 
conclusion of Book XI. , §§ 42, 45, 48, 49, and 50, he emlpoys corpse in the 
singular, according to the present orthography and syntax. Are we to 
charge the printers with the error, or to credit them with the correction ? 



Lect. xvi.] LATIN INFLECTIONS. 297 

wMcli will then be equivalent to one in the numeral notation ; 
the third person singular of the past tense of active verbs shall 
end in the syllable -it, which will correspond to number two] 
and the objective shall terminate in the syllable -um, answering 
to three. This would in fact be the Latin system, except that 
there is a greater variety of Latin endings than those I have men- 
tioned. The terminations here answer the same purpose as the 
numbers, and it is plain that the order of the words in the period 
becomes grammatically indifferent : 

Gulielmus percuss it Petrum, 
G-ulielm u s Petrum percuss it, 
Petrum percuss it Gulielmus, 
Petrum Gulielmus percuss it, 
Percuss it Gulielmus Petrum, 
Percuss it Petrum Gulielmus, 

all being equally clear, and all meaning the same thing. "While 
therefore this simple phrase admits of but one arrangement in 
English, the Latin syntax allows half a dozen, all equally une- 
quivocal in meaning. 

Every Latin verb has numerous terminations, each of which 
indicates whether the action expressed by it is past, present, or 
future, whether its subject is singular or plural, and whether it 
is in the first, second, or third person. Every noun has several 
terminations, each of which determines its case, nominative, geni- 
tive, (possessive,) and dative, accusative or ablative, (objective,) 
and the like, its number, and generally also its gender. Every 
adjective has many endings, each of which denotes the same ac- 
cidents as those of the noun. In many instances, the endings of 
the noun and adjective indicative of case, number, and gender, 
are the same in both classes of words ; in others, they are differ- 
ent, but whether like or unlike, they, and those of the verb also, 
correspond to each other, so that when the forms are once thor- 
oughly mastered, it is in general easy to decide, by the termina- 
tions alone, without reference to position, to what noun a partic- 
ular adjective belongs, and what are the relations between the 
noun and the verb. Hence, in English, the form determines lit- 
tle, the position much ; in Latin, the relative importance of the 
two conditions is reversed, and, comparatively speaking, order is 
13* 



298 MODEEIST LATIN. [Lect. xvt. 

nothing, form is everything. The Latins could employ foreign 
names or other words, only by clipping or stretching them to 
their own standard, and not only conforming them to their or- 
thoepy, but to their syntax also. Accordingly, the Celtic, Ten- 
tonic, and other barbarous common and proper nonns, which oc- 
cur so often in Roman history, are so much disfigured by changes 
in the radical combinations of letters, and especially in their char- 
acteristic terminations, that it is difficult to detect their original 
elements, and they aid us little in discovering the forms which 
marked the non-Eoman dialects of those periods. The modern 
writers of the sixteenth century — a period when the European 
languages were little studied out of their native territory — re- 
sorted to Latin as a means of communication, whenever they 
wished to make themselves understood beyond the limits of their 
respective countries, and the rigid syntax of that language com- 
pelled them to perform similar operations on the modern names 
which they introduced into their writings. The historian de 
Thou, or Thuanus, as he called himself, Latinized the names of 
his personages in so strange a fashion that, to follow him, one 
must know not only the inflections, but the etymology, both of 
the Latin and of the modern languages to which these names be- 
long. Thus the French family name Entraigues, etymologically, 
entre les aigues, (aigues being an old form for e a u x , 
waters,) and meaning letween-the-waters^ is, for the convenience 
of declension, converted into Interamnas, a Latin form, of 
corresponding etymology, and in the same way Du Bois became 
Sylvius . The native name of the celebrated Erasmus was 
Gheraerd Gheraerds. The root of G-heraerd is a verb signifying 
to desire, but the name was very repugnant to Roman orthogra- 
phy and syntax, and the great scholar Latinized his prenomen 
into Desiderius, and Grsecized his surname into Eras- 
mus, both signifying the same thing. In like manner, the lit- 
erary name of the Reformer Melanchthon is a translation of the 
German Schwarzerde, or Blackearth, and that of Oecolam- 
padius is a Greek version of his German family appellative, 
Hausschein.* 

* Bolton, in his Hypercritica, (Haslewood's Collection, II. 252,) says: "In 
this fine and meer schoolish folly, after that, George Buchanan is often taken ; 
not without casting his reader into obscurity. For in his histories, where he 



Lect. xyi.] value of latin grammak. 299 

But to return : From what has been said of the structure of 
the Latin, as compared with that of the English period, it is ob- 
vious that the analysis to which a proposition is subjected in the 
mind of the listener, is conducted by very different processes in 
Latin and English. In the English sentence, the proportion of 
words whose form fixes their grammatical category is too small 
to serve as a guide to the meaning. The logical relations must 
first be determined, and the syntactical relations inferred from 
them. In Latin, on the contrary, you first, so to speak, spell out 
the syntax, and thence infer the sense of the period. In other 
words, to parse an English sentence, you must first understand it ; 
to understand a Latin period, you must first parse it. And in 
this predominance of the formal over the logical lies the exceed- 
ing value of Latin as a grammatical discipline — not as a neces- 
sary means of comprehending or using our own tongue — but as 
a universal key to all language, a general type of comparison 
whereby to try all other modes of human speech. 

The English student who has mastered Latin may be assured, 
that he has thereby learned one-half of what he has to learn in 
acquiring any Continental language. The thorough comprehen- 
sion of this one syntax has stored his mind, once for all, with 
linguistic principles of general application, which, without this 
study, must be acquired over again, in the shape of independent 
concrete facts, with every new language he commences. Latin 
syntax, in fact, embraces and typifies all the rest ; and he who 
possesses himself of it, as a preliminary to varied linguistic attain- 
ment and research, will have made a preparation analogous to that 
of the naturalist, who familiarizes himself with the scientific 
classification and nomenclature of the study he pursues, by the 
critical study of some perfectly organized type, before he attempts 
to investigate the characteristics of inferior species. 

An important advantage of a positional and auxiliary over a 
flectional syntax, is that the chances of grammatical error are 

speaketli of one Wisehart, so little was his ear able to brook the name, as that, 
translating the sense thereof into Greek, of Wisehart comes forth unto us So 
phocardius." The Fardle of Facions gives us the converse of this practice, 
and calls the historian Tacitus, Cornelius the still. ' * For Cornelius the stylle, 
in his firste book of his yerely exploictes, called in Latine Annales, " &c, &c, 
chap, iiii., S. iii., edition of 1555 ; reprint of 1812, p. 312. 



300 UNTNFLECTED LANGUAGES. [Lect. xvt. 

diminished in about the same proportion as the number of forms 
is reduced, and, accordingly, we observe that the mistakes of bad 
speakers in English are never in the way of position, not often in 
particles or auxiliaries, but almost uniformly in the right employ- 
ment of inflections, such as the use of the singular verb with a 
plural noun, the confounding of the preterite with the past parti- 
ciple, or the employment of the strong inflection for the weak, or 
the weak for the strong. The double system of conjugation in 
our verbs, that with the letter-change and that by augmentation, 
is a fertile source of blunders, not only with children, but with 
older persons ; and for want of that particular exercise, our Angli- 
can memories are so little retentive of forms, that even distin- 
guished writers are sometimes convicted of grave transgressions 
in accidence.* 

Inflected languages have an important advantage over those 
whose words are invariable, in their greater freedom from 
equivocation, f In a perfect inflected grammar, in a system where, 
for instance, the forms of the genders and cases of nouns, adjec- 
tives, articles, and pronouns, should be so varied that no single 
ending could be used in different connections, or for different pur- 
poses ; where the distinctions of number, person, mood, tense, and 
condition, in the verbs, should have each its appropriate and ex- 
clusive form; and where the rules of verbal and prepositional 
regimen should be uniform and without exception; in such a 

* I noticed in the last lecture the confusion between the causative forms to 
fell, to lay, to set, and their respective simple verbs fall, lie, and sit; but almost 
all verbs with the strong inflection are subject to erroneous conjugation, especi- 
ally if the preterite and past participle differ from each other as well as from 
the indicative present. The verbs to go and to see are particularly unlucky in 
the treatment they receive. Had went is very often heard from ignorant per- 
sons, and I have known a gentleman in an important station in public life, a 
close personal and political friend of an American Senator afterwards Chief 
Magistrate of the United States, who often prefaced confidential explanations 
of his votes by saying: "I have sawed Mr. B * * * this morning, and he 
said," &c, &c. 

f In a previous lecture, I have alluded to the vagueness and mistiness of 
Latin vocables as being in a measure compensated by its inflections and struc- 
ture. As marked instances of this vagueness of meaning in individual words 
— a vagueness in some cases reaching not only to equivocation but to actual 
contradiction — I would refer to ratio, honestus, hospes, sinister as applied to the 
auspices, etc. - 



Lect. xvi.] EQUIVOCAL CONSTKUCTIOIN-S. 301 

system, the meaning of an author might be obscure from pro- 
foundness of thought, or vague from the indefiniteness of the 
vocabulary, but it could hardly be equivocal. The passages in 
classic authors where either one of two meanings is, grammati- 
cally speaking, equally probable, are not very numerous, and 
where they actually occur, it usually arises from neglecting the 
inflectional, and employing a simpler construction, or from the 
fact that one inflection is obliged to serve for more than one pur- 
pose. In the illustration just used, I showed that the relative 
positions of the nominative and the objective were indifferent in 
Latin ; both might follow the verb, both might precede it, the 
nominative might go before and the objective after, as in Eng- 
lish, or the direct contrary; Gulielmus Petrum per- 
cuss i t , in the order nominative, objective, verb, being just as 
clear and unequivocal as when the objective follows the verb. 
We have in English a remarkable construction, borrowed proba- 
bly from the Latin, by which, in a dependent proposition, the 
objective with the infinitive is put for the nominative with a finite 
verb. Thus, " I think him to be a man of talents," instead of " I 
think that he is a man of talents." Now, awkward as this is, 
its meaning is perfectly unequivocal. The Greeks and the Latins 
employed the same form, but much more extensively, and by no 
means with the infinitive of neuter verbs alone, as to he, and the 
like, but with active or transitive verbs, which themselves took 
and governed another objective or accusative.* This is one of 
the cases where a departure from general syntactical principles 
may produce an uncertainty of meaning. When Pyrrhus con- 
sulted the oracle as to the result of his meditated war with Rome, 
the reply was, " I declare you, O Pyrrhus, the Romans to be able 
to conquer ! " ISTow in Greek and Latin, as we have said, there 
was no rule of position requiring the objective to follow the verb 
which governed it, and it was therefore doubtful whether the 
oracle meant, " I declare you to be able to conquer the Romans," 
or, "I declare the Romans to be able to conquer you." 

* We find, in early English, examples of the objective before other infini- 
tives than that of the substantive verb. Thus, in Genesis xxxvii. 7, older 
Wycliffite version : " I wenede vs to bynden hondfullis in the feelde, and myn 
hondful as to ryse." The modern construction, " I saw him go," and the like, 
is not an analogous form, but of a different origin. 



302 EQUIVOCAL CONSTKUCTIONS. [Lect. xvi. 

Ill English, on the other hand, so mnch depends on position, 
and the possible varieties of position between two logically con- 
nected words are so many, that it is often extremely difficult to 
frame a long sentence, where it shall not be grammatically uncer- 
tain to which of two or three subjects or antecedents a predicate 
or relative belongs. Hence, we are continually driven to turn 
from the dead letter to the living thought, to project ourselves 
into the mind of the author, in order to determine the grammati- 
cal connection of his words ; to divine his special meaning from 
the general tenor of his discourse, rather than to infer it from his 
syntax. Of all English writers, Spenser shows himself most in- 
dependent of the laws of position. He disregards altogether the 
common grammatical rule of referring the relative to the last 
antecedent, and trusts entirely to the sagacity of the reader to 
detect the who in the multitude of lies and shes that go before it.* 
Apart from the point of equivocation, which does not often cre- 
ate any real logical difficulty in comprehending an author, how- 
ever much we may be embarrassed in parsing him, I do not think 
that, with respect to precision of expression, or the nice discrimi- 
nation of delicate distinctions of thought and shades of sentiment, 
inflected languages have any advantage. These qualities of speech 
are independent of grammatical form. They are determined by 
the inherent expressiveness of individual words, far more than by 
their syntactical relations, and it would be difficult to produce an 
example of a subtlety of thought expressible by inflection, which 
could not be conveyed with equal precision and certainty, by 
proper uninflected words with the aid of particles and auxiliaries, f 

* The description of the combat between Sir Guyon and Pyrochles, in Canto 
XI. , book I. , of the Faerie Queene, is a characteristic example of this gram- 
matical confusion. 

In Danish the possessive case of the personal pronoun (hans, hendes) is distin- 
guished from the possessive pronoun (sin), so that the embarrassment often 
arising in English from the confusion of these categories is avoided, as it was 
in ancient Latin. 

f Doubtless habuissem is a more elegant and convenient form than / 
might, could, would, or should-have-Jiad, which grammars give as its equivalents, 
but our varieties of expression, awkward as they are, more than compensate 
us, by their distinctions of meaning, for the simplicity of the one word, which 
the Romans used for so many. Fontenelle said : " Si je recommencais la vie, je 
f e r a i s tout ce que j'ai fait." Did he mean I would do, or I should do ? or did 
he, and do others using like inflections, syncretize the two thoughts in one ex 



Lect. xvi.] OKDEE OP THOUGHT. 303 

Emphasis itself may often be made to serve as an auxiliary. Take, 
for example, the phrase : " Why will ye die ? " Here we may 
have three very distinct shades, according to the reading, " Why 
will ye die ? " or " Why will ye die ? " or again, " Why will ye 
die?"* 

Fixedness of position is an essential quality of syntax in lan- 
guages where grammatical relations are not determined by inflec- 
tion, because position only can indicate the relation between a 
given word, and those with which it is connected by particles and 
auxiliaries. 

But though the position of words must be a fixed one, yet it 
does not necessarily follow the natural order of thought in any 
given case, but may be entirely independent of logical sequence, 
and of course arbitrary. Of this there are numerous examples in 
English. Except when we depart from the idiom of the language, 
by poetic or rhetorical license, we must place first, the subject, 
then the copula or predicate verb, and then the object, as, for ex- 
ample, William struck Peter, William being the subject or agent, 
struck the verb, Peter the object or sufferer. Now, this may be 
the logical order of thought, or it may not, according to circum- 
stances, but nevertheless the law of position in English is inflexi- 



pression ? In such cases, the context, or the circumstances under which the 
words were spoken, must be called in to decide. In English, the auxiliary de- 
termines the sense. In some cases our English auxiliary will has the full force 
of an independent word. We all feel that I will not, is much stronger than^'e 
Tie mux pas. 

The office of verbal inflections is to express qualified and conditioned, rather 
than complex, thought. The difficulty of comprehending an idea, or of ex- 
pressing it in any language with a reasonably copious vocabulary, does not lie 
in its conditions, or even in its complexity, but is proportioned to its subtlety, 
and what Browne calls its elementarity . So long as we can separate from the 
radical conception the qualifications and combinations accidental to it, we can 
readily express those qualifications and combinations by auxiliary or other 
subordinate forms. In thought and in language, so far as decomposition is 
practicable, comprehension and expression are easy, but, as in chemistry con- 
sidered as a sensuous manifestation of immaterial force, where analysis ends, 
there mystery begins. 

* Demosthenes is said on one occasion to have emphasized the word fitoduror 
(hireling) by purposely misplacing the accent, and pronouncing it, /uiaduToc. 
The audience, in correcting his mispronunciation, repeated the epithet with 
the proper accent. "Yes," exclaimed the orator, "you agree with me — he is 
a /McOuTog." 



304: ORDEB OF THOUGHT. [Lect. xvi. 

ble. If, for example, the words just supposed are littered in re- 
ply to the question, Who struck Peter ? then the grammatical rule 
and the logical order of arrangement coincide, inasmuch as the 
personality of the agent would first suggest itself to the respond- 
ent. But had the question been, Whom did "William strike ? it is 
equally clear that the name of the object, Peter, would first rise in 
the mind, and logically should be first expressed by the lips. So 
had it been asked, What did William do. to Peter \ the thought and 
word struck logically would, and grammatically should, take prec- 
edence. It is easy to imagine that, without any question put, 
circumstances may make first and most prominent in the mind of 
the speaker, either the subject, the predicate, or the object, and it 
is a most important convenience to him to be able to follow what, 
in the particular case, is the natural order of thought. In inflect- 
ed languages there is little difficulty in following this order, inas- 
much as the form of every word indicates with certainty its 
grammatical case.* 

* In discussions upon the relations between the logical order of thought and 
the syntactical succession of words, it has been sometimes assumed, and at 
other times argued, that we are to inquire into the construction of the proposi- 
tion as abstracted from all circumstances which might affect the order of 
thought and expression in the mind of either speaker or hearer. This is to 
suppose a case which, in articulate or written language cannot exist, and in point 
of fact seldom, if ever, does exist in purely intellectual processes. No man 
speaks or writes without a motive, and that motive originates in circumstances 
that necessarily modify the order in which thought rises to the mind, and 
words to the lips or pen. 

We know language only in its concrete form, and the grammatical and 
philological question always is : What is the order of thought under such or 
such circumstances ? The rhetorical question is still more complicated : How 
am I, under the circumstances special to me, to arrange my words, that they 
may produce the right impression on the mind or heart of my hearer under the 
circumstances that are operating on Mm ? This, indeed, is purely a matter of 
an, and belongs as little to philology as do metaphysical inquiries into the ab- 
stract laws of thought. Men are usually so much under the control of subject- 
ive emotion that they utter their words without calculating their effect before- 
hand, and they habitually arrange them according to the syntactical laws of 
the language they are speaking, by a process which long practice has rendered 
mechanical and unconscious. The circumstances which affect the order of 
thought in an independent proposition, uttered not as a reply to a question, 
nor with any reference to the conditions peculiar to the person addressed, are 
too various even to admit of generalization or classification. An example or 
two must suffice. To take the proposition I have so often employed as an 



Lect. xvi ] COLLOCATION OF WORDS. 305 

It is obvious that the power of arranging the period at will — 
of always placing at the most conspicuous point the prominent 
word, the key-note of the emotion we seek to excite — is a logical 
and rhetorical advantage of the greatest moment. If no such 
motive of position exists, the speaker may consult the laws of 
euphonic sequence, or metrical convenience, and order his words 
in such succession of articulate sounds as falls most agreeably 
upon the ear. Accordingly, in languages which have this flexi- 
bility of structure, we observe that orators, when they would rouse 
the passions of their audience, arrange their periods so as to give 
to the emphatic words the most effective positions ; when, on the 
contrary, they would soothe the minds, or allay the irritation of 
their hearers, they seek a flowing and melodious collocation of 
sounds, or sink words suggestive of offence by placing them in 
unemphatic parts of the sentence. Thus, to a certain extent, in 
these tongues, a speaker might accomplish by mere collocation 
what in others he must effect by selection, and, with the same 
words, he "might frame a sentence which would excite the indig- 
nation of his audience, and another which, while communicating 
precisely the same fact, should, by making a different element 
prominent in the order of utterance, be received with little emo- 
tion. For the complete illustration of what I have been saying 

illustration, William struck Peter. If we suppose Peter, as a son or relative, 
to be invested with special interest in the eyes of the speaker, and William to 
be comparatively a stranger, the name, as the representative of the personality 
of Peter, would be first in the order of thought, and in languages where, as in 
Latin, expression is free to conform to the thought, first in the order of words 
also. Hence the natural arrangement of the proposition would be : Peter 
[objective] struck William [nominative]. 

The order of thought and speech would be the same, if the action were re- 
versed, and Peter were the agent, William the sufferer. Again, if the blow 
were a very severe one, the character of the act would be most prominent in 
the mind of the speaker, and the order of expression would be : struck Peter 
[objective] William [nominative]. In general, it may be said that the relative 
emphasis with which the different words composing a proposition are uttered, 
if it could be exactly measured, would serve as a guide to the place of the 
words in the logical order of succession, the most emphatic words coming first. 

In many languages, the order of arrangement is inverted, or at least changed, 
in interrogative sentences. In others, interrogative pronouns, particles, or 
auxiliary verbal forms, very often serve to put the question independently of 
the order of the words. Among the great European tongues, the Italian is less 
bound to a fixed sequence in interrogative sentences than any other. 



306 COLLOCATION" OF WOEDS. [Lect. xvi. 

it would be necessary to resort to more of Greek and Latin quo- 
tation than would be appropriate, but classical scholars will find 
in those literatures many examples of great skill in ordering 
words with reference to effect. Demosthenes, in particular, ex- 
hibits consummate dexterity in this art. At his pleasure, he 
separates his lightning and his thunder by an interval that allows 
his hearer half to forget the threatened detonation, or he instan- 
taneously follows up the dazzling flash with a pealing explosion, 
that stuns, prostrates, and crushes the stoutest opponent. 

English poetry, and that of the highest character, is full of in- 
stances where the rhetoric has overpowered the grammar, and the 
poet has availed himself of what is called poetic license, to place 
his words in such order as to give them their best effect, without 
regard to the rigid rules of our obstinate syntax. Take, for ex- 
ample, this couplet from Byron's Adieu : 

The night winds sigh, the breakers roar, 
And shrieks the wild sea-mew. 

Here the last line is far more effective than it would have been, 
if the nominative had preceded the verb : 

The wild sea-mew shrieks. 

In the first line, no such change of position was required in either 
member, because the nouns wind and "breakers are of themselves 
suggestive of the sounds which belong to them, whereas form and 
power of flight are the ideas which most naturally couple them- 
selves with the name of the bird. So, in King Lear : 

Such bursts of horrid thunder, 
Such groans of roaring wind and rain I never 
Remember to have heard ! 

Here the force of the passage would have been much weakened 
by following the rule of placing the objective after the verb : 

I never remember to have heard such bursts of thunder, &c. 

And in Samuel : 

Nabal is his name, and folly is with him, 



Lect. xyl] COLLOCATION OF WORDS. 307 

is far more forcible to those who know that the name Kabal 
means a fool, than if the nsual order, his name is Nabal, had been 
observed ; Fool is his name, and folly is with him, than, His name 
is fool, and folly is with him. So, in Jacob's reply to Pharaoh, 
the shortness and emptiness of human life are more strikingly 
expressed by the phrase : " Few and evil have the days of the 
years of my lif e been," than by the more familiar English arrange- 
ment of the same words. 

It was not for reasons of metrical convenience, bnt from a deep 
knowledge of the laws of thought, that, in announcing the argu- 
ment of his great epic, Milton enumerates the several branches of 
the subject in a dependent form, before he introduces the com- 
paratively insignificant governing verb, which does not appear 
till the sixth line of the introductory invocation : 

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world and all our woe, 
With loss of Eden, till one greater man 
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, 
Sing Heavenly Muse, &c. 

Here the whole great drama, in its successive scenes, man's first 
sin, its consequences temporal and spiritual, his redemption by 
Christ and final salvation, is brought before us at once in all its 
majesty, weakened by no tame conventionalities of introduction. 
The Anglo-Saxon, although its original variety of inflection 
had been greatly reduced before the date of its most flourishing 
literature, still retained a good deal of freedom of collocation. 
The Anglo-Saxon version of the New Testament generally fol- 
lows its original in the order of its syntax, and early English 
writers employed, in prose at least, greater liberty of position than 
is now practised. It is an interesting observation, that the mod- 
ern Italian has inherited from its Latin mother a great freedom 
of periodic arrangement, though with a marked inferiority in 
power of inflection. It has an immense advantage over the 
French, in variety of admissible collocations of words in a given 
sentence, as well as in the greater number of allied forms of ex- 
pression. The French inflections, indeed, as has been before ob- 
served, are much less complicated and complete to the ear than 



308 SYNTAX OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES. [Lect. XVI. 

to the eye ; and if we strip the accidence of the Sectional sylla- 
bles or letters which in the spoken tongue are silent, the distinct 
variations in the forms of words are far fewer than they appear 
in the written language. But the difference between French and 
Italian in flexibility of syntax does not depend upon this circum- 
stance alone, for Italian has nearly as great a superiority in lib- 
erty of syntactical order over the Spanish, which possesses full and 
distinctly marked inflections. The freedom of the Italian syntax 
is to be ascribed in part to the fact that it is, relatively speaking, 
both an aboriginal and, to a great extent, an unmixed tongue,* 
spoken by the descendants of those to whom the maternal Latin 
was native, and retaining the radical forms and grammatical ca- 
pabilities of that language ; whereas French and Spanish are 
strangers to the soil, corrupted by a large infusion of foreign in- 
gredients, and spoken by nations alien in descent from those who 
employed the common source of both as their mother-tongue. 
The wretched servitude, under which Italy has for centuries al- 
ternately struggled and slumbered, has prevented the free em- 
ployment of its language on such themes as to bring out fully its 
great capacities, and make it known to intellectual Europe as an 
intellectual speech ; but its many-sidedness and catholicity of ex- 
pression, its rhetorical facility of presenting a thought in so many 
different aspects, render it valuable as a linguistic study, inde- 
pendently of the claims of its literature. 

In general it may be said, that in inflected languages, the point 
of view in which the subject presents itself to the mind of the 
speaker, is the determining principle of the collocation of words 
in periods ; but at the same time, they allow such an arrangement 
as to enable the speaker to suit the structure of the sentence to 
the supposed condition of -the mind of the hearer, or to the impres- 
sion which he wishes to produce upon him. The natural order 
in which thought develops itself in the mind of one already cog- 
nizant of the facts, agitated with the emotion, or possessed of the 
conclusions which he wishes to communicate to another, is not by 

* I mean that it was so considered by those who spoke it, as they did not 
and could not refer most derivative words to their radicals. Recent German 
linguistic science has taught us of the nineteenth century far more of Latin 
etymology than was known to the most learned Romans at the beginning of 
our era. 



Lect. xvi.] COLLOCATION OF WORDS. 309 

any means necessarily that which would be most readily intelligi- 
ble to a mind ignorant of the facts, or most impressive to one in- 
tellectually or morally otherwise affected towards the subject. 
Hence the power of diversified arrangement of words in in- 
flected languages is valuable, not merely because it permits a 
speaker to follow what is to him a logical order of sequence, but 
because a master of language, who knows the human heart also, 
may thereby accommodate the forms of his speech to the endless 
variety of characters, conditions, passions, and intelligences, of 
which our discordant humanity is made up. 

There is another point which must not be overlooked. An in- 
flected language, with periods compacted of words knit each to 
each in unbroken succession, is eminently favorable to continuity 
of thought. A parenthetical qualification interrupts the chain of 
discourse much less abruptly, if it is syntactically connected with 
the period, than if it is, as is usual in English, interjectionally 
thrown in. It is said to be one of the tests of a perfect style, 
that you cannot change, omit, or even transpose, a word in a pe- 
riod, without weakening or perverting the meaning of the author. 
Although this may be true of English, I do not think it by any 
means applicable to inflected languages like the Greek or Latin, 
so far at least as the order of words is concerned, for there seem 
to be many constructions in which position is not only grammati- 
cally, but logically and rhetorically, indifferent. In the rough 
draft of one of Plato's works, the first few words were written 
by way of experiment in half a dozen different arrangements, and 
the famous stanza in the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, descriptive 
of a storm at sea, 

Stendon le nubi un tenebroso velo, &c, 

is said to have been composed by the poet in ten times as many 
forms. Doubtless, in such a wide variety of sequences, there were 
some discoverable differences of meaning ; but in the main, both 
the philosopher and the poet were aiming in all this nicety at a 
sensuous, as much as at an intellectual effect upon the reader, 
however logically important a particular succession of words may 
have been in other passages of their writings. 



LECTURE XYII. 

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS. 
III. 

It is a remarkable fact that the modern languages known in 
literature are, perhaps without exception, poorer in grammatical 
inflections than the ancient tongues from which they are re- 
spectively derived ; and that, consequently, the syntactical rela- 
tions of important words are made to depend much more on aux- 
iliaries, determinative particles, and position. In fact, the change 
in this respect is so great as to have given a new linguistic charac- 
ter to the tongues which now constitute the speech of civilized 
man. I alluded on a former occasion to a doctrine advanced by 
very eminent philologists, that grammatical structure is a surer 
test of linguistic affinity than comparison of vocabularies. But 
though this doctrine, as limited and understood by the ablest lin- 
guists, is true in its application to the primary distinctions between 
great classes of languages, as, for example, the Semitic and Indo- 
European ; yet it properly relates to remote and generic, not spe- 
cific affinities, and is not capable of such extension as to be of 
much practical value in comparing the mixed and derivative lan- 
guages of Europe with those from which they are immediately 
descended. 

We know, with historical certainty, that what are called the 
Romance languages, and their many local dialects, are derived 
from Italic speeches grouped under the convenient name of Latin, 
and known to us only through the literature of ancient Rome 
which is their common representative. But what coincidence of 
syntactical structure do we find between the Romance languages 
and the common mother of them all ? The Italian resembles the 
Latin in independence of fixed laws of periodic arrangement, but 
here the grammatical likeness ends, and if we apply that test 
alone, it would be quite as easy to make out a linguistic affinity 
(310) 



Lect. xvn.] GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS. 311 

between Italian and Greek as between Italian and Latin. Latin 
has no article, definite or indefinite ; its noun, adjective, pronoun, 
and participle have not only the distinction of number, but of 
three genders also, and a full system of inflected cases ; its adjec- 
tives admit of degrees of comparison ; and its verbs have a pas- 
sive voice. Italian, on the contrary, has two articles ; its nouns, 
adjectives, pronouns, and participles, though varied for number, 
have no distinction of case ; its adjectives are compared only by 
the aid of particles, issimo being only an intensive ; it has no 
neuter gender, and its verbs are without a passive voice. All this 
is true also of Spanish,* Portuguese, and French. These diversi- 
ties of grammar would have been held to disprove a linguistic re- 
lationship between Latin and its descendants, were not such re- 
lationship established both by identity of vocabulary and by 
positive historical evidence. So, with respect to Greek, we know 
that more closely literal, more exactly word-for-word translations, 
(and this is certainly one of the best tests of grammatical resem- 
blance,) can be made from it into German, than into any of the 
languages of Southern Europe, which, through the Latin, are 
more nearly related to it. Another fact bearing on this same 
question is, that the points of syntactical structure or general 
grammar, in which the modern languages of Southern and South- 
eastern Europe approach each other most closely, are just those 
in which they least resemble the Latin and the ancient Greek, 
from which they are respectively derived ; and therefore, in spite 
of their diversity of origin, and their discrepancies of vocabulary 
and syntax, they must have been influenced by powerful common 
tendencies. 

The general resemblance between the languages of modern 
Europe, in points where they differ from the grammar of Greek 
and Latin as exhibited in classical literature, is not a matter of 
obvious explanation. It has been maintained that the popular 
colloquial speech of ancient Greece and Rome, and especially the 
vulgar and rural dialects of both, differed widely from the writ- 
ten languages, and nearly approximated to the modern spoken 
tongues which represent them. The supposed resemblance be- 

* The participial adjectives in -or, -ora, in Catalan and in some other His- 
panic dialects, have a passive gerundial force. 



312 ITALIAN DIALECTS. [Lect. xyii. 

tween ancient colloquial Greek and modern Romaic, between 
ancient colloquial Latin, or the rustic dialects, and modern Italian, 
is an extremely interesting and curious subject, and it has been at 
least made out that many forms in the two modern dialects, 
hitherto supposed to be recent corruptions, are really of a very 
early date ; but to assume that those dialects are merely the pop- 
ular speech of Athens and of Rome, would be to claim for them 
an immutability, a persistence of character, which is at variance 
with what observation teaches us is the inevitable law of all lan- 
guage, and, moreover, with what historical evidence proves as to 
successive changes in the very tongues in question. Modern 
Italian is divided into at least a score of clearly marked distinct 
dialects, and but few of the characteristic peculiarities of these 
can be traced to any ancient source. The differences between 
them, in point of vocabulary, seem to depend very much on the 
special extraneous influences to which the localities where they 
are spoken have been exposed; but with regard to their very 
wide diversities in inflection, in syntax, and in pronunciation, 
although the same influences have doubtless been active in pro- 
ducing them, yet it is very difficult to trace the relation between 
the cause and the effect. Disregarding relatively unimportant 
exceptions, the most general classification we can make of these 
dialects is into those with full, and those with meagre inflections. 
The northern dialects, those spoken in the provinces most subject 
to invasion by, and commixture with, unallied races, have usually 
the fewest inflections ; those of southern Italy, on the contrary, 
where the population is more homogeneous, or where the ming- 
ling of races dates further back, are generally more fully in- 
flected.* 

Perhaps the most interesting linguistic fact connected with 
the transition from an inflectional and independent, to a 
positional and auxiliary, grammatical structure, is that in the 
latter condition of syntax, the radical forms, which had been buried 

* All cultivated Italians read Latin as an antiquated form of their own lan- 
guage. The conversational dialect of Lombards, Roinagnesi, and some other 
non Toscani, if less easy and graceful than that of the Tuscans, is more digni- 
fied and more classical. It is an interesting fact that Spanish tyranny in Lom- 
bardy and Austrian tyranny in Venetia have left few or no traces in the lan- 
guage of those provinces. 



Lect. xvri.] eettjen of eadical foems. 313 

and almost lost in inflected and derivative words, are revived, and 
again employed in what we must suppose to be very near approxi- 
mations to the earliest shape in which they existed as articulate 
words. There are many examples of this in the dialects of north- 
ern Italy, and those which occur in every sentence of modern 
French are perhaps even more striking. Homme, femme, 
an, b o n , are not to be considered as either derivatives or cor- 
ruptions of the Latin homo, femina, annus, bonus. 
They are simply the radicals, the true words, restored to their 
pristine integrity by rejecting the accidental changes which in- 
flection has produced ; for few linguistic inquirers doubt that the 
Latins said horn, fern, an, bon, before they said homo, 
femina, &mius, honus* 

It is a received theory among English, and pretty generally 
among Continental philologists, that modern languages are, not 
accidentally but essentially, and by virtue of some universal law 
of mutation, distinguished from ancient ones by greater simplicity 
of grammatical form. The doctrine, as stated by Latham, is, that — 

1. The earlier the stage of a given language is, the greater the 
amount of its inflectional forms, and the converse. 

2. As languages become modern, they substitute prepositions 
and auxiliaries for cases and tenses. 

3. The amount of inflection is in the inverse proportion to the 
amount of prepositions and auxiliary verbs. 

4. In the course of time languages drop their inflections, and 
substitute circumlocutions by means of propositions, &c. The 
reverse never takes place. 

It is obvious that the last three of these propositions are little 
more than repetitions, or rather specifications of the first, and 

* In the return of words to their primitive forms, we have an evidence of 
the organic nature of language, but the law of persistence, change, and rever- 
sion is not the same in the word as in the plant or animal. The successive 
generations of the vegetable or the animated creature are identical in their 
characteristics, so long as the external conditions in which they live are con- 
stant ; these characteristics change when the influential circumstances of the 
propagation and growth of the particular organism are changed ; and when 
disturbing or abnormal causes cease to operate, the plant or the animal returns 
to the typical f orm. The word, on the other hand, invariably, if not normally, 
undergoes successive mutations under the same continuing conditions, and 
disturbing influences do not accelerate its divergence, but bring it back to its 
original type. See Lecture xii. 
14 



314 HISTOKY OF INFLECTIONS. [Lect. xvii. 

equally evident that the first, in the form put by our author, is 
untrue. That all languages which have been reduced to writing 
have thereafter tended to flectional simplification is undisputed, 
but no genetic theory of the origin of inflections has ever been 
proposed, which did not directly contradict the general propo- 
sition enunciated by Latham. All these theories suppose either 
an organic evolution of inflected from simple forms, or a coales- 
cence of different parts of speech into single words, and of 
course, in every language, an " earlier stage " than that in which 
the inflections were fully developed. If Latham's doctrine were 
true, we should be driven to the conclusion that such forms as the 
Latin subjunctive pluperfect habuissetis, and the Greek 
eftsfiovXsvjisda, were not agglutinate or derivative, but either 
primitive or preceded by still more complicated inflections. We 
should thus be compelled to believe that language was a thing, 
not of development and growth, but, in its most perfected form, a 
possession of primeval man, and that all subsequent changes were 
but corruptions. I mentioned in a former lecture several instances 
where the formation of new inflections in very modern times was 
matter of historical certainty. The list might easily have been in- 
creased, and, though we cannot positively show the mode of de- 
velopment of the whole modern conjugation of a Romance verb, 
and though some of the forms are undoubtedly mere corruptions 
of ancient inflections, and others, at present, quite inexplicable, 
yet the cases are very numerous where we have the strongest evi- 
dence that conjugations and declensions have arisen in very recent 
times, by processes precisely analogous to those which in the in- 
fancy of man produced them. It is obvious, then, that in the 
present state of our knowledge, we find no ground for the assump- 
tion of such a change in the constitution of the human mind, for 
it is nothing less, as Latham's broad propositions involve. We can 
assign probable reasons for linguistic changes, so far as change ex- 
ists, without any such violent supposition, and it is far safer to 
confine ourselves to the statement of a philological fact common 
to a large class of languages, than to announce hypothetical propo- 
sitions as laws embracing all human speech. 

The languages of savages, never reduced to writing, and of 
many nations among whom literature is little diffused, are aston- 
ishingly complex and multifarious in their inflections ; and as, for 



Lect. xvn.] EFFECTS OF CONQUEST. 315 

the want of recorded monuments, researches into their past history 
are impossible, we can have no warrant whatever for saying, either 
that such languages are in a very early stage of existence, or that 
their structure is less complicated than it was at some previous 
period. 

If we compare existing unwritten with written languages, 
and both with what we know of their history, we shall, I think, 
conclude that, in general, the process of flectional development 
and agglutination goes on, and the forms become more and more 
complicated, until the language is reduced to writing, and a litera- 
ture is created. At this period the formation of new inflections 
is arrested, and the tendency thereafter is to simplification in form, 
increase of substance or vocabulary, and discrimination in significa- 
tion ; so that if a language adopts a written character at an early 
stage of its growth, it will be less complicated in its grammatical 
structure than if it exists only in a spoken form until a late period. 

With respect to the modern tendency of written languages to 
simplification of form, there are two causes almost universal in 
their operation, which have not generally been sufficiently con- 
sidered in their bearing on this particular point. These are for- 
eign conquest, accompanied by the intermixture of a strange 
population with the native race, and the equally universal intro- 
duction of new religions by alien teachers. Although we cannot 
always specify the precise mode of operation of these transform- 
ing causes, yet they seem to me of themselves sufficient to have 
produced quite as great linguistic revolutions as we have witnessed 
in the speech of Europe, and indeed it is rather surprising that so 
much, than that so little, of the ancient tongues of Latium and 
Hellas yet exists in a recognizable form.* 

I have stated it on a former occasion as a generally verified 
fact, that in the case of the subjugation of a civilized, by a barba- 
rian or a less numerous race, the native speech is adopted by the 
conquerors. 

How then would a given language probably be modified by 
becoming the organ of communication between foreign masters 
or teachers and their subjects or pupils ? * We learn the vocabu- 

* See Bracket, Grammaire Historique de la Langue Francaise, pp. 52, 54, 56, 
147. 



316 EFFECTS OF CONQUEST. [Lect. xvn. 

lary of another language readily, its grammatical inflections and 
phraseological combinations with infinite difficulty. While there- 
fore conquerors and missionaries woula soon acquire radicals 
enough to make themselves intelligible, they would slowly, if 
ever, master the complicated forms of a foreign speech. Their 
commanding position would give authority even to their imperfect 
dialect, and especially if they were, as at least the missionary 
almost universally would be, intellectually superior to the subject 
race, their mutilated inflections and foreign idioms, bearing the 
stamp of both physical and mental power and dignity, would be- 
come characteristics of elevated and refined speech, and sooner or 
later supersede the more complicated grammatical machinery of 
the native tongue. To these influences would be added others of 
a similar character, derived from the new commercial relations to 
which conquest usually gives birth, and thus while the vocabulary 
might remain comparatively unchanged, the formal characteristics 
of the syntax might undergo an almost total revolution. There 
are few countries of Europe, few of civilized Asia, whose lan- 
guages have not been modified and accommodated to the conveni- 
ence of strangers, by such causes as I have described, and it would 
be difficult if not impossible to find a written speech which has 
remained wholly exempt from their action. Although, then, we 
can undoubtedly perceive that in these latter ages of general inter- 
communion, all human speech is exposed to certain external influ- 
ences of a universal character, we are not in possession of facts 
which authorize us to say, that there exists at the present day any 
inherent common tendency of language in either direction, and it 
is idle to speculate on conjectural causes for an unascertained 
phenomenon. Eo European language, perhaps I may say no 
tongue possessing a literature, has been so little exposed for the 
last eight hundred years to the influences of which I have spoken, 
as the Icelandic, and a comparison of this language, in its present 
form, with the Swedish and Danish — which, in the eleventh cen- 
tury, if not later, were identical with it — is instructive in reference 
to the point under consideration. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark 
have not been devastated by conquest, nor has there been any 
large admixture of foreign with the native blood ; but to all alien 
influences, except those of violence, they have been much exposed, 
and the consequence has been, that while Icelandic has remained 



Lect. xvii.] ROMANCE DIALECTS. 317 

comparatively unchanged, Swedish and Danish have been almost 
completely revolutionized, in every thing but the roots of their 
vocabularies, and in these there has been a very great infusion of 
foreign material. In this instance the difference must be ascribed, 
not to any inherent tendency towards simplification of structure, 
but to external causes, and therefore in this, the best existing test 
case, we find little support for the theory in question. 

The countries composing the Roman Empire have been especi- 
ally exposed to every conceivable cause and mode of linguistic 
corruption. We must not forget that the rural population of 
Italy was almost extirpated by the conscription and by civil dis- 
cord, before the commencement of our era, and that the place of 
the Roman peasantry was supplied by Gallic, Teutonic, Hellenic, 
African, and Asiatic colonized soldiers, and praedial slaves, to 
none of whom was Latin a mother-tongue. The provinces were 
soon overrun, separated from the metropolitan seat of power, 
partially depopulated and re-peopled, split up into a multitude of 
petty principalities and nationalities, and finally reduced into an 
undistinguishable chaos, in which state they remained until the 
reign of Charlemagne restored western Christendom to a measure 
of light and order. The reconstruction of European society then 
commenced. There was an evident gravitation toward centres, a 
tendency to consolidation and the assimilation of discordant ele- 
ments. The fragmentary jargons began to harmonize, coalesce, 
and form national or at least provincial dialects, and finally, by 
processes which, when better understood, will throw more light 
on the general history of language than almost any other source 
of instruction, the great internal divisions of the Gothic and Ro- 
mance tongues were clearly established, and each became a special, 
well-marked, national idiom. * 

Persons not familiar with the civil history of the Middle Ages, 

* See Brachet, Orammaire Historique de la Langue Francaise, pp. 26-27. 
Though I cannot adopt all Brachet's conclusions as infallibly correct, yet I 
take pleasure in recommending his Orammaire Historique as the most learned 
and instructive work known to me on the history of the Modern Eomance 
languages. I must, however, observe that I think he underrates the influence 
of classic Latin on the literary tongue of Modern Italy. It should be added 
that Brachet's Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Francaise is also in- 
valuable ; but as, in general, he traces words only to their nearest source, it is 
not so satisfactory with regard to remoter derivations. 



318 KOMANCE DIALECTS. [Lect. xvn. 

are generally not aware of the confusion of tongues which pre- 
vailed throughout Christendom as late as the beginning of the 
fourteenth century. The fine old Catalan chronicler, Ramon 
Muntaner, who lived at that period, and had extensive opportuni- 
ties of observation in Europe and in Asia, testifies that small as 
were the numbers of his countrymen, yet no other one language 
was spoken by so many. " Yee will have marvaile," says he, " of 
what I shall telle you, but natheless, if yee marke well, yee shal 
finde that I telle you the trouthe ; that is to saine, there be no- 
where so moche folke that speketh one same tongue as of the 
Catalans. For in the reaume of Castille, there be many prov- 
inces, and everie of them useth his owne proper speche. Ye 
shalle finde the lyke diversity in Fraunce, in Englonde, in A1- 
mayne, and in all Rumelie ; and in lykewise in thempiry of Con- 
stantinople, the Morea, and Ylaquie, and Natolie, and other 
marches, and it is even so with as manye other peoples as bee in 
the worlde. Now, some menne may bee abashed hereat, and 
wene it is but an olde wyfe's tale, but thinke what ye liste, wete 
ye wel, it is the veray trouthe." * The mysterious tenacity with 
which language clings to the soil, seems to be the great conserva- 
tive force that prevented the total extinction of Latin in the 
countries where the wide political sway of Rome had planted it. 
Too much of like influence has been ascribed to the adoption of 



* The translation of the passage cited in the text was made from memory 
and is too much epitomized. In the edition of 1562, folio XXIII. a, the pas- 
sage is as follows : Daltra part vos maranellarets du na cosa queus dire, em- 
pero si be ho cercats, axin trobarets, q dun lien guatge sol de negunes gents 
non son tantes com Cathalans, q si volets dir Castellas, la dreta Castella poch 
dura, e poca es : quen Castella ha moltes Prouincies, q caseu parla son lengu- 
atge : e son axi departits com Cathalans, de Aragonesos. E si be Cathalans, e 
Aragonesos son tots de vn senyor, llengua llur es molt departida. E axi ma- 
teix trobarets en Franca, e en Anglaterra, e en Alemanya, e par tota Romania, 
quels Grechs qui son del Emperador de Constantinoble son axi mateix moltes 
Prouincies : axi com de la Morea, e del Reyalme de Macadonia, e del Reyalme 
del Natuli, e cli altres Prouincies moltes. Entre les quals ha aytants departi- 
ments de llur llenguatges, com ha de Cathalans a Aragonesos. E axi mateix 
ses de les altres Prouincies del mon, que horn diu que Tartres son molta gent, 
e non son : mas perco paren molts, es sotsmeten moltes nacions del mon, com 
james no trobarets Tartres qui facen res de ses mans, ans hostijen tostemps, e 
van ab llurs mullers, e ab llurs Infants, hostes, f eyts. E axi podets vos pensar 
si los Cathalans feyen atre tal, si serien molt mes que ells. 



Lect. xvii.] LATIN I1ST THE MIDDLE AGES. 319 

Latin as the language of the Romish church, and it is very doubt- 
ful whether that circumstance really had any very important in- 
fluence in the development and form of the modern Romance 
dialects. To all the Romance tribes, Christianity was taught 
through Latin, and though Augustine advises the preacher to 
make some slight concessions to popular ignorance of language, 
yet there is little cause to believe that the jargons of the Italian, 
Gallic, and Spanish provinces were ever much used as a vehicle 
of religious instruction. Grammatical Latin was sufficiently in- 
telligible for the purposes of the priesthood, in all those prov- 
inces when Christianity was established among them, and, once 
established, it was maintained by an authority that had more 
efficient means at its command than the persuasive accents of a 
maternal dialect. When, then, in the reign of Charlemagne, the 
Latin language was again cultivated for secular purposes, the 
classical literature of Rome made itself felt in modifying the 
spoken dialects which were struggling into recognized existence. 

With the Gothic languages the case was quite otherwise. The 
missionary who goes armed with the cross, not with the sword, 
must use a speech intelligible to those whom he would convert. 
Charlemagne indeed made Christians by force, but the Gothic 
tribes generally were brought to Christianity by arguments and 
persuasions addressed to them by ministers speaking to every man 
in his own tongue. Hence the languages of the Gothic stock 
were employed in the service of religion at a relatively earlier 
period than those of Romance origin, and were modified accord- 
ingly. They all have grammatical peculiarities which seem re- 
pugnant to their general syntactical principles, and which they 
appear to have borrowed from the idiom of Greek or Latin works 
translated into them, or imitated by native authors, and hence in 
those languages we can often detect the influence of ecclesiastical 
Latin. The Romance dialects, on the contrary, did not venture 
to trespass on themes, to the discussion of which the sacred tongue 
of Rome was appropriated, and their training and formative in- 
fluences were almost wholly of a secular character. 

The influence of the causes of linguistic change to which I have 
alluded, was exhausted, or at least greatly weakened in its action, 
as soon as strong and stable governments were organized. Con- 
servative forces now became predominant, and of these unques- 



320 INFLUENCE OF POETEY. [Lect. xvn. 

tionably tlie most important is the diffusion of a general taste for 
poetry. Poetic thought requires a certain dignity and elevation 
of diction inconsistent with the employment of trite, trivial, and 
especially vulgar and abbreviated expressions, and in spite of the 
theory and practice of Wordsworth, its dialect will always consist 
of a vocabulary in some degree less f amiliar than that of prose. 
The standard authors in prose and verse, especially in early stages 
of literature, are a little behind the language of their own period, 
because, among other reasons, before their works can have ac- 
quired such a diff iision and such an established popularity as to 
have entitled them to a permanently conspicuous place in the 
literature of a nation, a sufficient time usually elapses to produce 
some changes in the spoken tongue. Poetry makes a deeper im- 
pression than prose. Its forms address themselves more power- 
fully to the faculty of memory, and for this reason, as well as for 
its sententiousness, and its greater condensation and pungency of 
expression, it is more frequently quoted. Hence, a poem becomes 
less soon obsolete than a prose work of equal merit and even pop- 
ularity, and of course it has a greater influence in keeping alive 
the dialect in which it is expressed. Poetry, considered as an art, 
is more essentially imitative than any branch of prose writing. 
Its means are much more restricted, its rules more arbitrary, its 
models more authoritative. In studying the art, therefore, the 
poet takes form and material together, and he who has imbibed 
the spirit of a Spenser or a Milton, can hardly fail unconsciously 
to adopt a Spenserian or a Miltonic diction. 

But our present business is rather with the inflectional forms, 
than with the vocabulary or the grammatical structure of the lan- 
guage. Inflected forms, being more or less alike in each class of 
words, have a tendency to produce similarity of termination and, 
of course, rhyme. If, therefore, a word is so formed that by 
dropping an inflected syllable a convenient rhyme is lost, the in- 
flection will be retained in poetry after it has begun to be obsolete 
in prose. So, if there are two forms of a given word, while, in 
the conversational and prose dialect, there is always a tendency to 
discard one of them, the poet will find in the necessities of rhyme, 
in the convenience of making a word at pleasure monosyllabic or 
polysyllabic, a half-foot, an iambus, or a dactyle, and in the ad- 
vantage of repetition without monotony, reasons for retaining 



Lect. xyii.] INFLUENCE OF POETRY. 321 

both, and thus poetry is constantly checking the progress of the 
language towards a rigid simplification. 

For instance, the present tendency of English is to reject the 
adjectival form in n, as woodm, leathern, and the like, and to 
employ a nonn in place of an adjective to express the material of 
which any thing is made ; but the multitude of verses in which 
the true adjective is employed, powerfully tends to prevent this 
ending from becoming altogether obsolete. Woodworth's fine 
song, ' The Old Oaken Bucket,' which has embalmed in undying 
verse so many of the most touching recollections of rural child- 
hood, will preserve the more poetic form oaken, together with the 
memory of the almost obsolete implement it celebrates, through 
all dialectic changes, as long as English shall be a spoken tongue. 

The influence of inflections upon the accentuation, and conse- 
quently the whole articulation of language, is a curious, and, so far 
as I am aware, nearly a new subject of inquiry. I shall have oc- 
casion to consider it more fully hereafter, but there are certain 
general principles which may be appropriately stated here. In 
languages varied by weak or augmentative inflections, the ending, 
which determines the grammatical relations of a word, must be 
distinctly articulated, in order that the category of the word may 
be known. To accomplish this, the principal accent must be car- 
ried forward towards the end of the word, so as to emphasize one 
of the variable syllables, or there must be a secondary accent upon 
the final syllable, unless this is prosodically long, and of course 
dwelt upon sufficiently to make it distinctly audible. 'Now, in 
languages with uninflected or little varied endings, the relations 
of the words being indicated by particles, auxiliaries, and position, 
the only syllable which requires to be made prominent by accent 
is the radical one, which generally lies near the beginning of the 
word, and the following syllables may be slurred over, with little 
danger of ambiguity. The grammatical determinatives, being in- 
dependent words, and usually monosyllabic, are necessarily pro- 
nounced with some distinctness, and accordingly, if the radical 
syllables are made audible, the speaker is pretty certain to be under- 
stood. And this is more especially true where, as in the German 
and the English for instance, there is a stong tendency to inflec- 
tion by the letter-change. In almost all cases where this change 
takes place, it occurs in a syllable which is radical and therefore 
14* 



322 AKTICTTLATION. [Lect. xvn. 

accented. Its distinct articulation makes the whole word intelli- 
gible, and we incline to suppress, or at least slight, all other gram- 
matical characteristics, while, in languages inflected by augmen- 
tation, both the radical and all the variable syllables that follow it 
must be enunciated with a clearness that requires a certain effort. 
Other things being equal then, that is, the proportion of vocal ele- 
ments being similar, and these of such character as to admit of 
equal facility of utterance, the language with strong inflections 
will be most easily pronounced by the speaker and at the same 
time most readily understood by the hearer. It is, however, true, 
on the other hand, that by a natural adaptation or compensation, the 
vocal elements seldom or never are equally proportioned in inflected 
and uninflected languages, the clear vowel predominating in the for- 
mer, and the obscure consonant in the latter, and, therefore, with a 
full and, musically speaking, staccato enunciation, such as is usually 
possessed by the natives of Southern Europe, the inflected lan- 
guage will be most intelligible to the listener. But the pronuncia- 
tion of vowels requires a much greater expenditure of breath than 
that of consonants, and the moment the articulation becomes arti- 
ficial, as in reading or speaking with an unnatural tone, the de- 
mands upon the respiration, and the necessity of distinctly pro- 
nouncing the unaccented terminal syllables, conspire to make it 
more fatiguing to the reader or speaker.* It is true Humboldt 

* It is a fact readily admissible by all close observers on this subject, that 
some languages make a larger demand upon the organs of speech than do 
others. Many years since, I had occasion, in Greece, to compare two copies 
of a legal record in modern Greek, a young American, thoroughly conversant 
with the language, assisting me. The method we followed was this : one of 
us held the first copy, the other the second, and we read aloud alternately to 
each other. We found we could not read more than ten or fifteen minutes 
each, at a time, without a considerable pause for recovering breath. The 
modern Greek system of accentuation is very diverse from that of the Gothic 
or other European tongues, and this circumstance, combined with the neces- 
sity of pronouncing distinctly the final syllable of words, makes so large de- 
mands on the respiration as to render reading aloud in that language an exer- 
cise very fatiguing to the lungs. Homer's simile, comparing the smooth flow 
of old Nestor's words to the falling of flakes of winter snow, does not apply to 
the utterance of the modern Palikari. 

Even Italian requires more breath than English, for, although ItaJians ap- 
pear to speak their own language with great mechanical facility, yet the voice 
soon tires, and Parliamentary speakers are often obliged to ask leave to suspend 
their harangues for a few minutes for the sake of repose — a circumstance 



Lect. xvn.] ITALIAN AKTICTTLATTON. 323 

remarks, that after having been long accustomed to use Spanish, 
he found the return to German fatiguing to the organs of speech. 
I think this, however, was from the necessity of employing in 
pronunciation muscles long disused, and that the sense of weariness 
was probably confined to those muscles. But let any one equally 
f amiliar with two foreign languages, one inflected and one inva- 
riable, or one with strong and one with weak inflections, try the 
experiment of reading aloud an hour in each, and he will find, as 
a general rule, that the more numerous the weak inflections, the 
more fatiguing the reading. German and Italian may serve to 
illustrate the difference, the latter exhausting the voice of the 
reader much the soonest. It is true that the comparison of these 
two languages is not in all respects a perfectly fair test of the 
soundness of the principles I have laid down. The German has 
terminal inflections to as great an extent as the Italian, but it 
must be remembered that, in conjunction with these, it very often 
employs the letter-change in the accented syllable, and this ren- 
ders it unnecessary to bring the final vowel fully out. The plural 
of die Hand is die Hande, but the vowel-change in the 
radical syllable indicates the number with so much certainty, that 
the e final may be dropped or half-suppressed, without creating 
any ambiguity. In Italian, the inflected syllable or syllables al- 
ways terminate the word, and themselves end with a vowel. In 
the singular number of the verbs, the person, and in nouns and 
adjectives, both number and gender are usually determined by 
the final vowel alone, so that in most cases the grammatical cate- 
gory of the word, and of course its relations to the period, depend 
upon a single vowel, which of course must be very clearly articu- 
lated, Again, the final vowel in German inflected words is very 
commonly the obscure e, while in Italian words it is the clear 
vowel a, or long o and i, the feminine e being of less frequent 
occurrence. All these Italian endings make larger demands on 
the organs of speech than the German terminations. Further, 
the constant use of the nominative personal pronoun in German 

which proves that the fatigue I have spoken of does not arise merely from the 
call upon unused muscles, as might perhaps be the case in reading or declaim- 
ing in a foreign tongue, but from the language itself. An English barrister, 
Dr. Kenealy for instance, will speak many hours, for days in succession, with 
Bcarcely any apparent pause. 



324 ITALIAN ARTICULATION. [Lect. xvn. 

allows a less emphatic utterance of the signs of person in the verb ; 
its frequent omission in Italian requires the signs to be made more 
conspicuous. The general result of all these circumstances is that 
in German, in most cases, the only syllable which requires a very 
distinct pronunciation is the radical ; in Italian, there is another 
syllable, and that a final vowel, which demands an equally full 
and precise delivery. Of course, in Italian, both causes of ex- 
haustion, the predominance of open vowels, and the necessity of 
accentuating and distinctly articulating a greater number of sylla- 
bles, co-exist, and allowance must be made accordingly in treating 
the German as a representative of uninflected, the Italian of in- 
flected languages, with reference to facility of utterance. At the 
same time, I think similar general conclusions will be arrived at 
by comparing any two speeches, the one inflected, the other unin- 
flected, or the one marked by weak, the other by strong inflections. 



LECTUEE XVIII. 

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS. 

IV. 

In order to comprehend and appreciate the nature and extent 
of the change which English has undergone in the transformation 
from an inflected to a comparatively uninfected structure, we 
must cast a glance at the grammatical system of the Anglo-Saxon, 
from which modern English is chiefly derived. The border-land 
of the Scandinavian and Teutonic races, whence the Anglo-Saxon 
invaders of England appear to have emigrated, has always been 
remarkable for the number of its local dialects, and it is very 
doubtful whether there is anywhere to be found a district of so 
narrow extent with so great a multitude of tongues, or rather jar- 
gons. The Frisic, which may be said as a whole to bear a closer 
resemblance to English than does any other linguistic group, dif- 
fers so much in different localities, that the dialects of Frisian 
parishes, separated only by a narrow arm of the sea, are often 
quite unintelligible to the inhabitants of each other. * The gen- 

* It is not always safe to rely on the vocabularies of philologists who collect 
words to sustain theories, and therefore we may doubt the accuracy of the 
generalizations of most inquirers into the Frisic patois. If we can depend on 
the testimony of unprejudiced observers, or of the people themselves, there is 
no such unity of speech among those who employ what, for want of a better 
term, or to support particular ethnological views, are collectively called the 
Frisian dialects, as to entitle them to a unity of designation. According to 
Kohl, one of the most acute and observant of travellers, and who has been 
happily characterized as the Herodotus of modern Europe, "The commonest 
things, which are named almost alike all over Europe, receive quite different 
names in the different Frisic islands. Thus, in Amrum, father is called 
A a t j ; on the Halligs, BabaorBabe; in Sylt, Foder orVaar; in many- 
districts on the main land, Tate; in the eastern part of Fohr, 1 i or A h i t j '. 
Although these people live within a couple of [German] miles from each other, 
these words differ more than pere, pater, padre, Vater, and father 

(325) 



326 ANGLO-SAXON GRAMMAK. [Lect. xvm. 

eral ultimate tendency of this confusion of tongues is undoubt- 
edly towards uniformity, but uniformity must be attained by 
mutual concessions. Each, dialect must sacrifice most of its indi- 
vidual peculiarities before a common speech can be framed out 
of the whole of them. These peculiarities he much in inflection. 
The dialects, it may be predicted, will be harmonized by dropping 
discordant endings ; and if the Frisic shall survive long enough 
to acquire a character of unity, it will be very nearly what the 
English would have been without the introduction of so many 
words of Romance origin. 

Such a process as this the Anglo-Saxon actually underwent in 
England, and accordingly its flectional system, in the earliest ex- 
amples which have come down to us, is less complete than in 
either of the Gothic tongues that contributed to its formation. 
In fact, the different Angle and Saxon dialects employed in Eng- 
land never thoroughly amalgamated, and there was always much 
irregularity and confusion in orthography and the use of inflec- 
tions, so that the accidence of the language, in no stage of it, 
exhibits the precision and uniformity of that of the Icelandic or 
the Moeso-Gothic. 

used for the same purpose by the French, Latins, Italians, Germans, and Eng- 
lish, who are separated by hundreds of leagues. We find among the Frisians 
not only primitive Germanic words, but what may be called common Eu- 
ropean radicals, which different localities seem to have distributed among 
them." 

" Even the names of their districts and islands are totally different in differ- 
ent dialects. For instance, the island called by the Frisians who speak High- 
German, S y 1 1 , is called by the inhabitants Sol, in Fohr Sol, and in Am- 
rum Sal." 

" The people of Amrum call the Frisians F r a s k , with the vowel short ; in 
the southern .districts, the word is F r e e s k e , with a long vowel ; elsewhere 
it is pronounced Fraasche." Kohl. II., Chap. XX. 

It appears further, from the same writer, that these numerous dialects are 
intelligible only to the inhabitants of the narrow localities where they are in- 
digenous, and that their variations are too great to permit the grammars and 
glossaries which have yet appeared to be regarded as anything more than ex- 
positions of the peculiarities of individual patois, and by no means as authori- 
ties for the existence of any such general speech as the imaginary Frisic of 
linguistic theories. The argument for the oneness of these dialects rests chiefly 
on negatives. It may be said of each of them : it is not Danish nor Dutch, 
nor Low-German nor High-German, but, at the same time, they all resemble 
any one of these languages very nearly as much as they do each other. See 
Lecture ii. 



Lect. xviii.] ANGLO-SAXON GEAMMAE. 327 

In giving a general sketch of the grammar of our ancient An- 
glican speech, I shall not notice local or archaic peculiarities of 
form, and the statements I make may be considered as appli- 
cable to the Anglo-Saxon in the best period of its literature, and, 
with unimportant exceptions, true of all its distinguishable dia- 
lects. 

In general, then, we may say that the article, noun, adjective, 
and pronoun were declinable, having different forms for the three 
genders, for four cases, and for the singular and plural numbers ; 
besides which, the personal pronoun of the first and second per- 
sons had a dual, or form exclusively appropriated to the number 
two. This, in the first person, was wit, we two ; in the second, 
git, you two. The possessive had also a dual. The adjective, 
as in the other Gothic languages, had two forms of inflection, the 
one employed when the adjective was used without a determina- 
tive, the other when it was preceded by an article or a pronoun 
agreeing also with the noun. These forms are called, respect- 
ively, the indefinite and the definite. Thus, the adjective corre- 
sponding to good, used in the definite form singular, or with a 
determinative, makes the nominative masculine g 6 d a , feminine, 
g 6 d e , neuter, g 6 d e ; the genitive or possessive, g 6 d a n , for 
all the genders. When nsed without a determinative, the nomi- 
native is god, for the three genders ; the genitive or possessive, 
g 6 d e s , for the masculine and neuter, and g 6 d r e for the femi- 
nine. The adjective was also regularly compared much as in the 
modern English augmentative form, but not by more and most 

The verbs had four moods : the indicative, subjunctive, impera- 
tive, and infinitive, and but two tenses, the present or indefinite, 
used also as a future, and the past. There were, however, com- 
pound tenses in the active voice, and a passive voice formed as in 
modern English by the aid of other verbs. In English the auxili- 
aries are generally used simply as indications of time, as, he will 
sing, which is merely a future of the verb to sing, like the Latin 
cantabit; he had sung, the Latin cantaverat. In Saxon, 
on the other hand, the auxiliary usually retained its independent 
meaning, and was more rarely employed as a mere determinative. 
Thus w i 1 1 a n , corresponding to our will, when used with an 
infinitive, did not form a future, but always expressed a purpose, 
as indeed it still often does, and with the remarkable exception of 



328 CHANGES IN ENGLISH GRAMMAR. [Lect. xvm. 

the verb beon, to be, which is generally future, the Saxon had 
absolutely no method of expressing the future by any form or 
combination of verbs, so that the context alone determines the 
time. 

While, then, the English article has but one form for all cases, 
genders, and numbers, the Saxon had ten. Our noun has two 
forms, one for the nominative and objective, one for the posses- 
sive and plural ; or, in the few nouns with the strong plural in- 
flection, four, as man, man's, men, men's / generally the Saxon 
had five or six. The modern adjective has one termination in the 
positive degree, the Saxon ten. The English regular or weak verb, 
as to love, seven endings ; the corresponding Saxon, thirteen, even 
without counting the inflected cases of the participles. From all 
this, it will be obvious that the Anglo-Saxon could indicate by in- 
flections many relations and conditions of words which we can 
express only by particles ; and that consequently it was more in- 
dependent of fixed laws of position, and less encumbered by de- 
terminatives, than modern English. By way of illustration of the 
force and beauty which the Anglo-Saxon element confers upon 
English, I compared the conclusion of the parable of the men who 
built their houses respectively upon sand and upon rock, in the 
versions of St. Matthew and St. Luke, as rendered by the author- 
ized English translation. It will be interesting to analyze St. Mat- 
thew's account of the same catastrophe in the Anglo-Saxon, in 
"Wyclifle's translation of about 1380, in Tyndale's, of 1526, and 
King James's, of 1611.* The Anglo-Saxon, translated word for 
word into our present English, would read thus :• then rained it, 
and there came flood, and blew winds, and rushed on that house, 
and the [or that] house fell, and its fall was great. 

Here it will be observed that the verbs rained, came, and blew 
all precede their nominatives, and it may be added that blew and 
rushed both have a distinct plural form, b 1 e o w on and ahrur^. 

In "Wyclifle's time, although the plural form of the verb was 
still retained, yet the general loss of the inflections of the noun 
had compelled the introduction of a positional syntax, and he 

* The texts of the Greek, Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and modern English 
versions of the passage under consideration, will be found in a note to Lecture 
vii., pages 142, 143. 



Lect. xvm.] CHANGES IN ENGLISH GEAMMAE. 329 

writes, in the modern order of arrangement: "and rayn came 
doun, and floodis camm, and wyndis blewm, and tliei hurlid<m in 
to that house ; and it f elle doun, and the f allyng doun therof 
was grete." 

Before Tyndale, 1526, the plural form of the verb in n, had 
become obsolete. We read, accordingly, in his version : " And 
abundaunce of rayne descended, and the fluddes came, and the 
wyndes blewe, and beet upon that housse, and it fell, and great 
was the fall of it." 

Between the Anglo-Saxon and the English of "Wycliffe, the 
most important structural, or rather rhetorical, difference is the 
greater freedom of arrangement in the Anglo-Saxon verbs, which 
in this passage, in three instances, precede the nominative ; where- 
as in "Wycliffe the verb uniformly follows its subject, as in the 
modern dialect. In the century and a half which intervened be- 
tween Wycliffe and Tyndale, not only had the verbs dropped the 
plural ending, but the definite article had become common. In 
Saxon, we cannot deny that the definite article existed, but it 
always partook very strongly of its original character of a demon- 
strative pronoun, and perhaps it should be rather regarded as such 
in the one instance where I have represented it by the, " and the 
house fell." In Wycliffe, rayn, floodis, and wyndis are all with- 
out the article, " rayn came doun, and fluddes camen, and wyndis 
blewen," and it is employed only before f allyng, " and the f allyng 
doun therof "; but in Tyndale' s time the noun had ceased to be 
used thus indefinitely, and fluddes, wyndes, and fall are all pre- 
ceded by the article the. The translators of 1611, with excellent 
judgment, adopted Tyndale's version word for word with no 
change except to say simply "the raine," for "abundaunce of 
rayne," which Tyndale had used. And here I cannot but pause 
to notice a remarkable felicity of expression in this translation, in 
the employment of an inversion of the regular order of words in 
the last clause of the verse. The fact of the fall of the house had 
been already announced, and made additionally striking by an 
enumeration of the circumstances which had preceded and caused 
it — the pouring of the rain, the rushing of the flood, the blast of 
the tempest. The immediate introduction of the noun fall would 
have added nothing to the effect of what had gone before. To 
heighten and intensify the impression, therefore, the translator 



330 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. [Lect. xvm. 

skillfully inverts the phrase, begins the concluding clause with 
the adjective — " and it fell, and great was the fall of it," — and 
thus produces a climax superior in force even to the original 
Greek text. 

When, as a natural result of Latin and Norman influence, the 
operation of such causes as I described in the last lecture had 
stripped the Anglo-Saxon of most of its inflections, and introduced 
a large number of Romance words and grammatical forms, the 
first effort of the newly-framed speech was to develop a new set 
of inflections, and if English had existed as an unwritten tongue 
for a sufficient time after the coalescence of the two elements into 
one language, it is probable that it would have acquired as com- 
plete a system of declension and conjugation, and consequently 
a syntax as free from restraints of position as either of its constit- 
uent tongues. The Saxon nouns had several modes of forming 
the plural, according to gender and declension. One of these de- 
clensions only made the nominative plural in s. This agreed 
with the Norman grammar, which, like the modern French, used 
s or z, (and in a few cases x,) as the sign of the plural, and it was 
natural that this coincidence should have been seized upon and 
adopted as a general rule for the construction of all plurals.* 
True, some plurals formed by letter-change or in n remained, but 
most Saxon nouns dropped the regular inflection, and from the 
very commencement of the English language took a plural in s. 
This is abundantly shown by Layamon and the Ormulum, the 
former using this plural (especially in the later text) very fre- 
quently, the latter employing it almost exclusively. 

The Saxon nouns had three genders, and the masculine and 
feminine were very often applied to objects incapable of sex. 
The Norman had but two genders, the neuter not being recog- 
nized in its grammar. When the two languages coalesced, a com- 



* This statement is too loose. Norman masculine nouns regularly made the 
nominative singular, the accusative and the vocative plural, in s, but the 
nominative plural was without that termination. But there were many excep- 
tions, and in these instances the nominative plural was also in s, as were also 
the plural of all feminines derived from Latin nouns of the first declension, 
and many derived from other declensions. The consequence was that the 
plurals in s were very much more numerous than those without it, and a 
foreigner would naturally have taken s as the general plural sign. 



LHCT. xrni.] NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 331 

promise was effected by employing the masculine and feminine 
as indications, not of grammatical gender, or termination, but of 
sex, and confining the neuter to objects without sex.* This, of 
course, led to the rejection of those Anglo-Saxon endings of the 
article, the noun, and the adjective, which had indicated gram- 
matical gender ; and as the Saxon inflections for case depended 
more or less upon the gender, they naturally were dropped also 
when grammatical gender was discarded. Nothing then was left 
for distinction but the numbers, singular and plural. Although 
one declension of the Saxon nouns made the plural in s, and 
thereby the general adoption of s as a sign for the plural of nouns 
was facilitated, yet no plural form of the Saxon adjective em- 
ployed that sign. The termination in e was the general nom- 
inative plural ending of all adjectives in the indefinite form, and 
this continued to be used in English, to designate that number for 
some centuries, though not with strict uniformity. Indeed, when 
the adjective was employed as a noun, it sometimes made the 
plural in e, even down to the end of the sixteenth century. f The 
e, as a sign of number, was finally dropped soon after that period, 
and adjectives have since been indeclinable, to the great advantage 
of our grammar. 

The verb, which, to the distinctions of number and person, in 
most languages adds those of time and other conditions, is always 
subject to a greater number of inflectional changes than any other 
part of speech. The conjugations of the Saxon and the Norman 
verb had scarcely any point of resemblance except the employ- 
ment of compound tenses, and the consequence naturally was, that 
the characteristic endings of both were principally rejected, and 
the radical of the verb left almost uninflected, and dependent on 
auxiliaries for the expression of the various modifications of its 
radical meaning. In its selection of auxiliaries, it conformed 
partly to Romance, partly to Gothic models ; and it must be ad- 
mitted that with respect to the future tense, the English syntax 
is an improvement upon the Saxon. Shall and will, it is true, 

* The lack of grammatical gender in English may perhaps be regarded as 
its most marked characteristic. See Bleek, Comparative Grammar of the 8. 
African Languages, Ursprung der Sprachc, etc. 

f See Lecture xiv. 



332 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. [Lect. xvhi. 

existed in that language, but not as true auxiliaries, and the use 
of them as signs of the future, if not directly borrowed from the 
Old-Northern, at least belongs to the Scandinavian, not the Teu- 
tonic side of Anglo-Saxon. 

One of the most curious facts in the history of the English verb 
is the tendency which existed in the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries to the formation of new regular inflections, by the 
coalescence or agglutination of verbs and pronouns. This was 
indeed, perhaps, in some sort, a dialectic peculiarity, but cases 
occur in too wide a range of writers to allow us to consider it as 
by any means altogether local in its character. It seems to have 
begun with the interrogative, where the pronoun, following the 
verb, would most easily unite with it ; but the agglutinate form 
is often used in affirmative periods. The coalescence of the pro- 
noun of the second person and the verb is most frequent, but ex- 
amples of a like process in the other persons are not wanting. 
Thus in the fable of Dame Siriz in Wright's Analecta Literaria, 
there are several instances of the use of willi and woldi, for / 
will and I would / in the ancient Interlocutory Poem in the first 
volume of the Keliquise Antiquse, we find kepi, hawy, ccmi, for 
I keep, I have, Icon ; in the Thrush and the Nightingale, in the 
same volume, ne rechi, for I do not reck, or care / forbeddi, for 
I forbid. The coalescence of the second person with the verb is 
extremely common, and there are few English writers of the 
fourteenth, century who do not furnish exemplifications of it. 
Robert of Gloucester has penkestow, misdostow, for thinkest 
thou, misdoest thou ; Dame Siriz, troustu, for trowest thou ; the 
Seven Sages, woltu, for thou wilt; the ancient Interlocutory 
Poem above referred to has a like form, with the pronoun, thu 
canstu y and Piers Ploughman, among numerous other cases, the 
negative inflection, why nadistou, why hadst-thou-not* 

* Similar combinations are found in German, even as late as the time of 
Luther. Thus, in Warnunge D. M. Luther an seine lieben Deudschen, Wit- 
tenberg, 1531, wiltu occurs at F. III., and mustu at F. b. In the much 
older Orendel und Bride, Zurich, 1858, we find instances of the coalescence of 
all the three persons with the verb : woldich,p. 17; mahtu,6; vasthi, 
woldhi, 1; kondhi, 9. 

In the famous abrenuntio Diaboli, of the eighth century, Wright 
(Biog. Britan. Lit. I. , 310,) prints forsachistu, gelobistu, but other 
critics separate the pronoun from the verb. There are many instances of like 



Lect. xvm.] NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 333 

In the carelessness of pronunciation, which usually marks hasty 
and familiar speaking, the auxiliary have is indistinctly articulated. 
" I should have gone," is pronounced almost, " I should a gone," 
and by persons ignorant of reading and writing, altogether so. 
In old English, books, many instances occur where the compound 
tense is thus printed, as, for example, in Lord Berners' Froissart, 
vol. I., chap. 225, " a man coude not cast an appell among the, 
but it shuld a fallen on a bassenet or a helme "; in Wycliffe's 
Apology for the Lollards, page 1, " I knowlech to a felid and 
seid |ms." In the Paston Letters, I. 22, " brybe's that wold a 
robbed a ship"; Paston Letters, I. 6, "a gret nowmbre come to 
Arfleet for to arescuyd it," in which last example the coalescence 
is complete.* 

A like tendency is discoverable in other classes of words, such 
as the formation of an objective of the definite article the by a 
coalescence with the prepositions in, on, and at / ythe, ith being 
often written for in the, oth for on the, atte for at the. There are 
also traces of a new form in the nouns. In Icelandic, Swedish, 
and Danish, the nouns have a definite declension formed by affix- 
ing the termination of the definite article according to case and 
gender. Thus, in Swedish, konung means king, konungen, 
theking, konungens, ^king's; hus means house, huset, 
the house, f A somewhat similar contraction existed in early Eng- 

combinations in old Icelandic, and among others may be mentioned the con- 
struction of a negative form of the verb by affixing the particle, a, at, a J> , 
or a5; also of negative forms of the noun, adjective, pronoun, and adverb, 
by affixing the syllables g i or k i . 

In Italian these combinations also occur. Ariosto has mogliema, for mia 
moglie ; moglierema is also used for the same ; patermo, for mio padre ; mam- 
mata for tua mamma. 

* In the Chronicle of Capgrave, p. 278, we meet ha lived, or a lived ; and 
these forms occur even in the Life of Kichard III., ascribed to More, as printed 
in Hardyng, p. 547, reprint of 1812. "Richard might (as the fame went) 
asaued hymself if he would afled awaie." But this passage is not in Rastell's 
edition of 1557, and More could hardly have adopted this colloquialism. 

\ The Swedish definite article is den for the masculine and feminine, d e t 
for the neuter. When post-positive in the process of coalescence the initial 
consonant d is dropped, and konung den becomes konungen, hus 
det, huset. This, at least, is the present grammatical resolution of the 
compound. Historically, however, konungen is the Icelandic koniin- 
g r i n n , a definite formed by the coalescence of the noun k o n li n g r , and 



334 NEW" ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. [Lect. xviii. 

lish, in the case of nouns beginning with a vowel. The empress 
was written and spoken as one word, thempress y the evangel or 
gospel thevangel y ^ apostle, thapostle; the ancre (anchor) 
themcre. There are even faint and doubtful indications of a like 
inclination with regard to the article an, and the creation of an 
indefinite form of the noun by employing this article as a prefix ; 
thus we find anedgetoole for an edge tool, a nounpire * for an 
umpire, a naugre for cm auger, a napron for an apron, but these 
seem to be rather cases of orthographical confusion than really 
new combinations. 

The effect of reducing a language to writing is to put a stop to 
the formation of inflections. Inflections doubtless often grow out 
of a hurried and indistinct pronunciation of familiar and fre- 
quently recurring combinations ; but, when the words are written, 
the mind is constantly brought back to the radical forms, and the 
tendency to coalescence thus arrested ; and indeed the effect of 
writing does not stop here, but it leads to the resolution of com- 
pounds not much altered in form, into their primitive elements. 

In listening to the conversation of uneducated persons, and even 
to the familiar colloquial speech of the better instructed, we ob- 
serve a strong inclination to the coalescence of words. Let a for- 
eigner, who should be wholly ignorant of the grammatical struc- 
ture of the European languages, but able to write down articula- 
tions, record the words of our ordinary conversation as he would 
hear them spoken. The result would be an approximation to an 
inflected language. He would agglutinate in writing the words 
which we agglutinate in speaking, and thus, in many cases, form 



the definite pronominal article hinn, (for which latter word the modern 
Swedish substitutes den,) and so of other nouns which have been tradition- 
ally handed down from the Old-Northern period. In the definite form of new 
words, the analogy of the primitive language has been followed and the arti- 
cle retains the d only when it stands alone. 

It is an interesting linguistic fact that in the Eoumanian, though a speech of 
Latin origin, the definite article is post-positive. 

* The n in nounpire may be radical, for it has been ingeniously suggested 
that this obscure word is perhaps n o n pair, odd one, a third person called in 
to turn the scale between two disagreeing arbitrators. Also the Anglo-Saxon 
form of auger is navegar, which would seem to show that the n here is like- 
wise radical. See Wedgewood, under apron. For many similar cases, see 
Wright's Volume of Vocabularies, p. 206 et seq. 



Lect. xyih.] NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 335 

a reo-ular conjugation. Take for example the interrogative use of 
the verb to have ; have I ? have you ? has he ? The stranger 
would not suspect that each of these phrases was composed of two 
words, but would treat them as the first, second, and third persons 
of an interrogative form of the verb to have. His spelling would 
conform to the pronunciation, and he would write havvi, havye, 
hazzy. Now those who first reduce a language to writing are 
much in the condition I have just supposed. They record what 
they hear, and had English long remained unwritten, the coales- 
cences would have become established, and conjugations and 
declensions formed accordingly. The interrogative would have 
had its regular verbal inflection, and a past infinitive, agone, 
af alien, would have grown out of the combination of the participle 
with the auxiliary, the latter becoming a syllabic augment.* 

This is precisely analogous to what actually did take place in 
most of the Romance dialects, because they were used colloquially 
for centuries before they were written, Latin being the language 
of the government, of law, of literature, and of religion. 

The two great elements of which English is composed had each 
its written dialect, and it would therefore have been quite natural 
that the new language should very early have become a written 
speech, if there had been an actual historical hiatus between 
Anglo-Saxon and Norman-English. But the change from the 
one to the other was so gradual, that the spoken dialect always 
existed in a written form, orthographical mutations following 
closely upon orthoepical revolutions. Between Latin and the 
modern Romance tongues, on the other hand, there was an inter- 
val, and consequently these latter, as literary dialects, had a defi- 
nite commencement, while English had none. Hence, English 
made little progress in new grammatical formations, and the pre- 
dominance of Norman influence led to the rejection not only of 
Saxon endings, but of many other facilities of expression, the loss 
of which is a very serious evil to the English tongue. For in- 
stance, the Saxon had a negative form for all verbs beginning 

* In French, it was only the early reduction of the spoken tongue to writing, 
which prevented the development of a regular negative verb and definite noun. 
N' a v o i r would have become permanently navoir, l'hommc, lomme, 
and un homme, nomme, in writing as in speech, had French remained 
merely an oral dialect a few centuries longer. 



336 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. [Lect. xvm. 

with a vowel, the aspirate h, or the semi-vowel w. This consisted 
in using the consonant n, the- initial of the Saxon negative parti- 
cle ne, as a prefix. The convenience of this form was strongly 
felt, and it was not abandoned in poetry for some centuries after 
the English became a distinct language. Chaucer constantly says 
I nam, for I am not, I nas, for I was not, he nould, for he would 
not, he nad, for he had not, I nill, for I will not. The Wycliffite 
versions often use the negative verb in the imperative, as in 
Judges xviii. 9 : "JVyle ye be negligent, nil ye ceese." Sylvester, 
at the end of the sixteenth century, occasionally employs this 
form, as, for example, in this verse of his twenty-sixth sonnet : 

Who nill be subjects, shall be slaves, in fine. 

We still retain the negative nill in the phrase, will he, nill he, 
whether he will or not, where will and nill are not auxiliaries, 
but independent verbs. Wesley attempted to revive nill, and 
wrote : " Man wills something, because it is pleasing to nature, 
and he mils something, because it is painful to nature." * The 
linguistic sense of the English people was at a low ebb in Wes- 
ley's time, and his use of nill found few if any imitators, but the 
fact that we still employ similar compounds in none, neither, 
never, which are simply one, either, ever, with the negative prefix n, 
shows that this form is not radically repugnant to the present ge- 
nius of the language, and I see nothing very improbable in the 
recovery of the negative verb. 

The Norman, though it had its coalescences, like the other Ro- 
mance dialects, as for instance in the case of the future, was 
nevertheless averse to compounds; and as it became more and 
more an influential element in the organization of English, it not 
only checked further coalescence, but led to the resolution of 
some compounds which had become established, and hence the 
new inflections were soon abandoned.f 

* Nolo, nill, becomes more strongly negative by assuming a positive form. 
JSfon volo is a negation of will, nolo is a volition. Why has not the French 
nolonte and nolition, as well as wlonte and volition ? 

f Our English verb to hunt appears to be allied to a Mceso-Gothic word of 
nearly similar form, which has been conjectured to be cognate with hand, so 
that the primary signification of hunt would be, to take with the hand, or 
catch. Some etymologists derive hound from hunt, but it is quite as probable 



Lect. xviii.] NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 337 

The only deliberate, organized experiment for the restoration 
of an obsolete English form, is that of the Society of Friends, 
who have long striven to reintroduce what they call the plain lan- 
guage, or the employment of the singular thou, and the corre- 
sponding verbal inflection, in place of the plural you, in address- 
ing a single person. It is not strange that a phraseology, which 
was adopted as the badge of a sect, should have failed to secure 
general acceptance, but the entire want of success in the attempt 
to establish it even among the Friends themselves, is a strong evi- 
dence of the rooted aversion of the Anglican people and speech 
to much variety of inflection. In the first fervor of religious 
party zeal, doubtless, educated Friends spoke more grammatically, 
but the second person of the verb does not appear ever to have 
been generally employed by their followers ; and even the nomi- 
native of the pronoun of the second person was soon discarded, so 
that will thee, has thee, does thee, were substituted for wilt thou, 
hast thou, dost thou. 

That we shall recover many lost Saxon words there can be no 
doubt, and poetry will yet reanimate obsolete forms specially 
adapted to metrical convenience. New regular inflections,* how- 
ever, are not to be expected, perhaps not even desired ; and some 
grammarians even consider it probable that formal distinctions of 
case, number, and person will be rejected altogether, and all 
grammatical relations determined by auxiliaries, prepositions, or 
other particles. That such has been the general tendency of 
English since the birth of its literature is quite certain, and the 

that hunt is derived from hound, which in Saxon was spelt not with ou, but 
simply u. In that case, to hunt would be to chase with hounds, or dogs, or, as 
we sometimes now say, to hound or to dog. At the period when there was a 
tendency to resolve compounds, this very obvious, and, as I much incline to 
believe, true etymology, struck the rude philologists of the time, and, accord- 
ingly, we find huntsman written in early English houndsman, sometimes as 
one word, but not unfrequently as two, hounds man. See the History of 
Helyas, Thorn's Early Prose Romances, III., 55, 65. 

* Among the possible improvements in language, we may suggest the de- 
sirableness of a form of comparison of diminution in degree. In the case of 
adjectives of really absolute character (as far as there are any such) there often 
exists an opposite or negative which answers the purpose of a special inflection. 
Thus to long, longer, longest, correspond short, shorter, shortest; but why 
should not this relation be expressed by inflections from the same root, signi- 
fying not long, less long, least 
15 



338 ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. [Lect. xvm. 

fact is too familiar to need to be established by proof, but one or 
two examples may be worth citing. The use of the possessive 
pronouns, and of the inflected possessive case of nouns and pro- 
nouns, was, until a comparatively recent period, very much more 
extensive than at present, and they were employed in many 
cases where the preposition with the objective now takes their 
place. In modern English, the inflected possessive of nouns ex- 
presses almost exclusively the notion of property or appurtenance. 
Hence, we say a marts hat, or a man's hand, but the description 
of a man, not a marts description. And, of course, we gener- 
ally limit the application of this form to words which indicate 
objects capable of possessing or enjoying the right of property ; 
in a word, to persons, or at least animated and conscious creatures, 
and we accordingly speak of a womarts bonnet, but not of a 
house's roof. In short, we now distinguish between the possess- 
ive and the genitive. This we must allow is a well-founded dis- 
tinction, but it is of recent introduction ; and indeed some mod- 
ern writers are inclined to discard it, but thus far with few imi- 
tators. Clifford, who had been a follower of Wycliffe, and re- 
canted, expresses his repentance in his will before referred to, by 
styling himself " unworthie and Goddis traytor." So in the 
Paston Letters, written in the fifteenth century, we find " the 
King's rebels, the King's traitors'' for rebels against the king, 
traitors to the king, and in Froissart, " his rebels'' These ex- 
pressions strike us oddly, but in reality they are not a whit more 
incongruous than the phrases, the Icing's enemies, our enemies, 
which have, singularly enough, remained current in English, and 
indeed in most European languages, but which will perhaps be- 
come as obsolete as the Icing's traitors. "We may consistently say 
the hing' s friends, because we feel that men have certain rights, 
or at least interests, in their friends and in the sentiments which 
constitute friendship, but the Icing's enemies is no way gram- 
matically distinguishable from the Icing's rebels. Eew instances 
now remain of this repugnant use of the possessive, but its lim- 
itation to persons did not originate till long after the date of the 
authorities I have cited. Lodge, who translated the works of L. 
Annseus Seneca, near the beginning of the seventeenth century, 
says, in the preface to the second edition of that work : " Read- 
er, I here once more present thee Senecaes translation." In this 



Lect. xyiii.] ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. 339 

case Seneca is to be considered the name, not of a person, but of 
his works collectively. This construction is frequent in Shake- 
speare, and Fuller in the Infant's Advocate printed in 1653, has 
this passage : " If we cannot perceive the manner of sins poison, 
no wonder if we cannot conceive the method of graces antidote, 
in Infants souls." Similar examples might be multiplied 'ad in- 
finitum* 

In like manner, what -is now a possessive pronoun was an- 
ciently but improperly used also as a genitive of the personal 
pronoun. In the Wyclinite version of Genesis ix. 2, we read : 
" And youre f eer and youre tremblyng be upon alle the beestis 
of erthe," where the modern version rightly has, " and the fear 
of you and the dread of youP The possessives of the third per- 
son his and their were employed in this way much later than 
those of the first and second person, and even in recent times 
many instances can be found where these pronouns take a rela- 
tive after them, as " their life who violate the principles of mo- 
rality," for " the life of those who."f 

* Notwithstanding this free use of the inflected possessive by old writers, 
we sometimes meet in them a long succession of the prepositional construc- 
tion, as in this passage from the life of Beza in Abel Redivivus, p. 471 : "for 
he not onely entred into a consideration of the truth of the doctrines of the 
Church tf/Rome," &c. 

f In Anglo-Saxon, the possessive pronoun singular of the first person was 
m i n , of the second pin. The genitive plural of the personal pronoun was 
lire in the first person, e o w e r in the second, hira, hiora, or heora, 
in the third. The possessive pronouns plural of the first and second persons 
were formed by treating the genitive plural of the personal pronouns as a 
nominative, and declining it like an adjective pronoun. For the third person, 
there was no possessive pronoun in either the singular or plural, but the geni- 
tives, h i s in the masculine and neuter singular, h i r e in the feminine singu- 
lar, and hira, hiora or heora for all genders in the plural, were used in- 
stead of possessive pronouns. The similarity of form between the genitive 
plural of the first and second persons and the plural possessive pronoun for 
those persons, naturally led to grammatical and logical confusion in the use 
of both, and the expressions I have quoted from the Wycliffite versions, " your 
fear," &c, were as improper at that time, as they would be now, for the log- 
ical distinction between the two pronominal forms was at no period of the lan- 
guage quite lost sight of, though it was not always strictly observed. 

In the transition from Anglo-Saxon to English, the genitive plural of the 
personal pronoun wis dropped, and the objective, with a preposition, substi- 
tuted for it. This change was made before the time of Wycliffe, and the use 
of the possessive pronoun, instead of the genitive of the personal pronoun, 



340 ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. [Lect. xvin. 

At present, the use of whose, the possessive of who, is pretty 
generally confined to persons, or things personified, and we should 
scruple to say, " I passed a house whose windows were open." 
This is a modern, and indeed by no means yet fully established, 
distinction. . In Anglo-Saxon, the form hwses, whence our 



was a violation of the idiom of the language. This is shown abundantly by 
the authority of the Wycliffite translators themselves, for they very generally 
make the distinction, as, for example, in Joshua vii. 13, where we read, 
" cursyinge is in the midel of thee," in the older text, and " in the myddis of 
thee," in the later, and in Ezekiel xxxvi. 23, where one text has " in the myd- 
dil of them," the other " in the myddis of them"; and so in many other pas- 
sages, where these old translations agree with the authorized version. The 
vulgarism " in our midst," " in your midst," " in their midst," now unhappily 
very common, grows out of this confusion. The possessive pronoun cannot 
be properly applied, except as indicative of possession or appurtenance. The 
" midst " of a company or community of persons is not a thing belonging or 
appurtenant to the company, or to the individuals composing it. It is a mere 
term of relation, of an adverbial, not a substantive, character, and is an inten- 
sified form of expression for among. The phrase in question, therefore, is a 
gross solecism, and unsupported by the authority of pure idiomatic English 
writers. Shakespeare, 2 Pt. Henry VI. iv. 8, has " through the very midst of 
you "; and this is the constant form in the authorized translation of the Bible. 
In Leviticus xxvi. 11, the Anglo-Saxon is to middes eowre (eower), to- 
rn i d d e s being a preposition governing the personal pronoun eowre. The 
English translations all give ' ' among you. " In John i. 26, where the Greek 
text is /uecog 6e vfiav, the Anglo-Saxon is to-middes eow; the later Wyc- 
liffite version, " in the myddil of you '"'/ the older, " the myddil man of you." 

In the passages where the later translations use among us, you, them, whom, 
the Wycliffite versions almost uniformly employ, " in the myddil or myddis"; 
and, of course, the exemplifications of this form are extremely numerous in 
those versions. In nine cases out of ten, certainly, the construction is, "in 
the myddil of us, you, them, or whom " ; but there are a few instances, as, for 
example, in Exodus xxxiv. 10, Numbers xiv. 13, where "from or in whos 
myddil or myddis," is used in both texts ; and in the older translation of 
Jerome's Prologue to Romans, we find, ' ' for myche merciful is God, the 
whiche wolde bringe you to oure followinge." Our is sometimes used in the 
same way elsewhere in Old-English, as in 1 Cor. i. 3, Wye. Vers., older text : 
" alle that inclepyn the name of oure Lord Jhesu Crist in ech place of hem 
and oure "; later text, " ech place of hem and of oure "; where, in the older 
text, our is a genitive plural. So in the much earlier Legend of St. Brandan, 
Perc. Soc, p. 5, your is made a genitive plural ; " ac youre an schal atta ende," 
and one of you shall at the end, &c. 

With respect to these last examples, as I remarked above, the employment 
of our and your in this construction was contrary to both principle and usage 
in the English of that period. The use of whose, or even of their, in such 



Lect. xviii.] ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. 341 

whose, was the genitive of all the genders of the pronoun h w a , 
and whose was universally employed as a neuter by the best Eng- 
lish writers until a recent period, as, in certain combinations, it 
still is by very good authorities. The origin of this distinction 
is to be found in a fact to which I have before alluded, namely, 
the change in the office of genders in grammar. In Anglo-Saxon, 
grammatical gender was independent of sex. So long as the mas- 
culine, feminine, and neuter were indiscriminately applied to ob- 
jects incapable of the distinction of sex, there was no very strong 
sense of a want of one possessive form for masculine and femi- 
nine, or in other words, personal objects, and another for neuter, 
or inanimate, impersonal things ; but as this distinction became 
better and better established, and who was appropriated toper- 
sons, which to things,* the use of one possessive form for both 
was more and more felt to be inconsistent, and the employment 
of the possessive of both nouns and pronouns was regulated ac- 
cordingly. 

The necessity of a double form for the more precise expression 
of ideas which have become distinct, has led to the development 
of one of the few new inflections which modern English has 
evolved. In Anglo-Saxon, the personal pronoun represented in 
English by he, she, it, made the genitive or possessive his for the 

phrases, would not have been so objectionable, (though I have not found 
their so employed in Wycliffe,) because there was no possessive pronoun for 
the relative, as we have seen there was not for the personal of the third person 
in Anglo-Saxon. In that language, h w 8e s , the genitive or possessive case of 
the relative, or rather, interrogative, hwa, hwset, was used instead of a 
possessive pronoun for all genders and numbers. Where, therefore, the An- 
glo-Saxon did not distinguish the possessive case and the possessive pronoun, 
it was not strange that early English should confound them. At present, 
however, the distinction is established, and it is a corruption of speech to dis- 
regard it. 

Milton's " my midst of sorrow," Samson Agonistes, 1339, is a poetical trans- 
position for ' the midst of my sorrow,' and has no bearing on the present 
question. 

* The Anglo-Saxon relative and interrogative was hwa, masc. and fern., 
and h w ae t , neut. It is true, hwa was generally employed in reference to 
persons, but, at least in interrogations, h w se t was very often used in the same 
way, as Hwaet is pes Mannes Sunu: Who is this Son of Man ? 

Who, as a relative, is a new grammatical form, not taken from either Anglo- 
Saxon or French. 



342 ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. [Lect. xvin. 

masculine and nenter gender, her (hire) for the feminine, and 
so long as grammatical gender had not an invariable relation to 
sex, the employment of a common form for the masculine and 
neuter excited no feeling of incongruity. The change in the 
grammatical significance of gender suggested the same embar- 
rassment with relation to the universal application of his as of 
whose, and when this was brought into distinct consciousness, a 
remedy was provided. At first, it was used as a possessive, with- 
out inflection or a preposition, and several instances of this occur 
in Shakespeare, as also in Leviticus xxv. 5, of the Bible of 1611 : 
" That which groweth of it own accord." * Its, although to be 
found in printed books of a somewhat earlier date, is not once 
used in that edition, his being, in all cases except the one just 
cited, employed instead. The precise date and occasion of the 
first introduction of its is not ascertained, but it could not have 
been far from the year 1600. In the Acts of the Apostles we 
still read in the standard editions of our own day : " The iron 

* The use of an uninflected form as a possessive, without the preposition of, 
was by no means confined to the pronoun it. In Robert of Gloucester, 93, we 
have 

Conan |>e queue cosyn, he clepude out po stille, 
and again 

f>e ich be kyng of Breteyne, pat was bin vncle lond. 

The first verse of Robert de Brunne's version of Langtof t runs thus : 

In Saint Bede bokes writen er stories olde ; 
and on page 13 : 

In Gharlemagn courte, sire of Saint Dinys. 

In the older Wyclifiite version of Genesis xxix. 10, we find : " Whom 
whanne Jacob hadde seen, and wiste hir his unkil dowghter "; and xxx. 36 : 
" and putte a space of thre daies weye bitwix hem and his dowghtir husboond." 
These latter cases might, it is true, be considered compounds, like the Danish 
Farbror,. Morbror, (Fader-Broder, Moder-Broder,) but this 
explanation will not apply to the earlier examples I have given, or to numer- 
ous instances of a later date. Thus in the Paston Letters, I. 6 : "for his sou- 
'eyn lady sake"; I. 118 : "on Seint Simon day and Jude"; I. 122 : "such as 
most have intrest in the Lord Wyllughby Goodes"; II. 298 : "my brother Boaf 
asent." 

In the Fardle of Facions, 1555, p. 321, reprint of 1812, we have: "acer- 
taine sede which groweth there of the owne accorde "; and in Holland's Pliny, 
I. 24, "hauing fire of the owne before." These forms are by no means un- 
common. 



Lect. xytii.] INTKODUCTION OF ITS. 343 

gate opened of his own accord." I believe the earliest instances 
of the use of the neuter possessive yet observed are in Shake- 
speare, and other dramatists of that age. Most English writers 
continued for some time longer to employ his indiscriminately 
with reference to male persons or creatures, and to inanimate im- 
personal things. For a considerable period about the beginning 
of the seventeenth century, there was evidently a sense of incon- 
gruity in the application of his to objects incapable of the distinc- 
tion of sex, and at the same time a reluctance to sanction the in- 
troduction of the new form its as a substitute. Accordingly, for 
the first half of that century, many of the best writers reject them 
both, and I think English f olios can be found, which do not con- 
tain a single example of either. Of it, thereof, and longer cir- 
cumlocutions were preferred, or the very idea of the possessive 
relation was avoided altogether. Although Sir Thomas Browne, 
writing about 1660, sometimes has its five or six times on one 
page, yet few authors of an earlier date freely use this possessive, 
and I do not remember meeting it very frequently in any writer 
older than T. Heywood. Ben Jonson sometimes employs its in 
his works, but does not recognize it in his Grammar. It occurs 
rarely in Milton's prose, and not above three or four times in his 
poetry. Walton commonly employs his instead. Fuller has its 
in some of his works, in others he rejects it, and in the Pisgah 
Sight of Palestine, printed in 1650, both forms are sometimes 
applied to a neuter noun in the course of a single sentence.* Sir 
Thomas Browne, on the other hand, rarely, if ever, employs his 
as a neuter, and I think that after the Restoration in 1660, 
scarcely any instances occur of the use of the old possessive for 
the newly-formed inflection. It is somewhat singular that the 
neuter possessive did not appear till long after the grammatical 
change with respect to gender had taken place in literature, but 
the explanation is to be found partly in a repugnance to the in- 
troduction of new inflections, and partly in the fact that the old 
application of genders was kept up in the spoken language long 

* "Many miles hence, this river solitarily runs on as sensible of its sad fate 
suddenly to fall into the Dead Sea, at Ashdoth-Pisgah, where all his comfort 
is to have the company of two other brooks. " Book II. , 58. 

"Whether from the violence of the wind then blowing on its stream, and 
angring it beyond his banks." Book II., 59. 



344 INTKODUCTION OF ITS. [Lect. xvni. 

after it liad become extinct in the written. Indeed, they are still 
applied to inanimate objects, in the same confused way, in some 
English provincial dialects ; and, even apart from the poetical vo- 
cabulary, traces of the same practice exist among ns to this day. 
The indiscriminate attribution of the three genders, as in Anglo- 
Saxon and German, or of the masculine and feminine, as in 
French and Italian, to inanimate objects, is philosophically a 
blemish, and practically a serious inconvenience, in those lan- 
guages, and it is a great improvement in English that it has sim- 
plified its grammar, by rejecting so superfluous, unmeaning, and 
embarrassing a subtlety. 

A singular obsolete corruption in the syntax of our mother- 
tongue was revived not far from the period of the introduction 
of its, and it has been usually ascribed to a passion for generaliz- 
ing the laws of language before its facts were well ascertained. 
Two centuries since it was common to write John Ms stick, 
Mary her hook, and the like. Ben Jonson says, that " nouns in 
z, s, sh, g, and ch, make, in the possessive singular, is, in the 
plural, es" "which distinction," continues he, "not observed, 
brought in the monstrous syntax of the pronoun his joining with 
a noun betokening a possessor, as the prmce his houseP* The 
practice appears to have been founded on the grammatical theory 
that s, as a sign of the possessive case, was a contraction of the 
possessive pronoun his. But it is argued that those who intro- 
duced the innovation did not remember that s was the sign of 
the possessive in feminine as well as in masculine nouns, and in 
the plural number of the strong inflection also, in neither of 



* Harvey, in 1580, in his reply to Immerito (Spenser), speaking of English 
orthography says : " But see what absurdities thys yl fauoured Orthographye, 
or rather Pseudography, hath ingendered ; and howe one errour still breedeth 
and begetteth an other. Have wee not Mooneth, for Moonthe : sithence, for 
since ; whilest, for whilste ; phantasie, for phansie ; euen for evn ; diuel, for 
divl ; God hys wrathe, for Goddes wrath ; and a thousande of the same stampe, 
wherein the corrupte Orthography in the moste hath beene the sole, or prin- 
cipall cause of corrupte Prosody e in ouer many." Mulcaster, in 1582, re- 
marks on this form : " Neither do I se anie cause wher to use his, saving after 
words which end in s, as ' Socrates his councell was this, Platoes that, and 
Aristotles this.' " 

Ccesar his occurs in the Polychronkon, p. 227. God, Mary is Sonne, in 
Morte Arthur, (Furrdval,) p. 157. 



Lect. xvni.] HIS AS A POSITIVE SIG^l 345 

which cases could it have been originally a contraction of his. 
They should have further considered, it is added, that upon this 
theory, the s final of the possessive pronouns hers and theirs 
must in like manner have been derived from his, which is a 
manifest absurdity, and that the s in his itself, which is evidently 
an inflected form of the nominative masculine personal pronoun 
he, could not be thus explained. As I have just remarked, his 
is the Anglo-Saxon possessive form of the pronoun for both the 
masculine and neuter genders, the feminine having anciently had 
the form hire, nearly corresponding to the modern her. It 
should be added that the s final is the earliest known sign of 
the possessive or genitive case in most of the languages of the 
Indo-European stock, and it may fairly be insisted, that, for the 
present, this may be received as an ultimate grammatical fact, 
not at this time admitting of etymological explanation.* 

There is a striking analogous fact in the modern history of the 
Gothic languages, which cannot be passed over. I refer to the 
nearly contemporaneous introduction of a precisely similar syn- 
tactical form in the Swedish, Danish, and German, all of which 
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries very frequently em- 
ployed the possessive pronoun, in the masculine and feminine 
genders, and both numbers, as the sign of the genitive case of 
the noun.f In these dialects, there is the same discrepancy be- 
tween the primitive form and the modern substitute, and even a 
greater difficulty in supposing the usual genitive sign to be de- 
rived from the possessive pronoun. This use of the pronoun is 
generally if not always confined to proper names, whereas in 
English it was applied also to common nouns, and in the former 
case it seems to have originated in the difficulty of declining 
foreign names with the native inflection. A similar device was 
sometimes resorted to in the Latin of that day, in the syntax of 

* See last Note at the end of this Lecture. 

f In German we find the following forms : In dem Wolf seinem Leibe, 
Grimm, Kinder und Haus Marchen, ed. 1879, p. 112. Den Swinegel Sien 
Fru, the same, pp. 647-8. 

I would also refer to the following singular construction in English, "In 
men's and women's minds." Here the s cannot stand for his. For the Scan- 
dinavian dialects, see examples cited by Varning, Bet Jydske Folksprog, Part 
1. ff 356, and same work, Part II. ff 69. 
15* 



346 ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. [Lect. xvin. 

modern proper names, and I think it probable that the Gothic 
languages borrowed it from this corrupt Latin form, for there is 
little reason to suppose that they could all have taken it from the 
syntax of the one among them which first introduced it. 

If, however, further investigation shall show that it spontane- 
ously originated in any two or more of them, the fact becomes 
very important, and it would be fair to regard it as an expres- 
sion of the linguistic sense of the Gothic race entitled to no 
little weight as an evidence that, in spite of the difficulty of 
reconciling the forms, the real origin of the Gothic genitive or 
possessive inflection is to be found in a coalescence of the noun 
and the possessive pronoun.* 

The rejection of inflections, and especially the want of a pas- 
sive voice, have compelled the use of some very complex and 
awkward expressions. The phrases I am told, he had oeen gone 
half an hour, strike foreigners as particularly monstrous. Such 
combinations as " he was given a commission in a new regiment " 
are employed by some of the best writers of the present day, as 
well as by those of an earlier period, f I find, in a late discourse 

* The grammar of the Mceso-Gothic presents a case of resemblance between 
the genitive of the personal pronouns, which serves as a possessive, and the 
genitive or possessive case of certain nouns and adjectives. The genitive 
singular of the personal pronoun is masc. i s , fern, i z o s , neut. i s . The geni- 
tive singular of a numerous class of masculine nouns ends in is; as nom. 
wigs, gen. w i g i s . The same case of many f eminines ends in j o s or o s ; 
as nom. piudangardi, gen. piudangardjos. Thus far, there is a 
certain likeness between the possessive of the pronoun and the possessive end- 
ing of the noun, but the coincidences are too few to authorize the supposition 
that the ending in question was formed by a coalescence of the noun and pro- 
noun, for in most Moeso-Gothic nouns, the possessive form admits of no such 
explanation. Between the genitive of the adjective and the pronoun, the 
resemblance is much stronger. Take the indefinite form of the adjective gods, 



Masc. 


Fem. 






Neut. 


Nom. gods, 


goda, 


g 


od 


, godata. 


Gen. g o d i s , 


godaizos, 






godis. 


So superlative b a t i s t s , best. 










Nom. batists, 


batista, 






batist. 


Gen. b a t i s t i s , 


batistaizos, 






batistis. 



f Lord Berners, in his translation of Froissart, Vol. I., chap. 39, says : "I 
was shewd the gleave." Gibbon, Vol. I., chap. VII., observes of Maximin, 
"he had been denied admittance." 



Lect. xyiii.] anomalous constktjctions. 347 

by an eminent divine, a recommendation to literary men to ac- 
quire some manual occupation " which may be-f alien-back upon 
in case of need"; and Coleridge speaks of an impediment to 
" men's turning their minds inwards upon themselves." " Such 
a thing has been gone-through-with" " it ought to-be-taken-notice- 
of" "it ought not to-be-lost-sight-of" are really compound, or 
rather agglutinate passives, and the number of such will probably 
rather increase than diminish.* They make the language not 
less intelligible, but less artistic; less poetical, but not less prac- 
tical, and they are therefore fully in accordance with those unde- 
fined tendencies which constitute the present drift of the English 
language. 

* Buskin's boldness as a writer is by no means confined to the expression of 
critical opinion, and he does not hesitate to employ familiar combinations 
from which more timid authors might shrink. Thus, vol. i. , third ed. , p. 63 : 
" Now the whole determination of this question depends upon whether the un- 
usual fact be," &c. Ibid., p. 121, "but it depends upon lohether the energy of 
the mind which receives the instruction be sufficient," &c. Ibid., 390, "a 
confusion which you might as well hope to draw sea-sand particle by particle, 
as to imitate leaf for leaf." 

Note referred to on p. 345. — Notwithstanding these arguments, some 
able philologists are of opinion that, however corresponding forms are to be 
explained elsewhere, s as the sign of the possessive in English nouns is de- 
rived from, and truly represents, the possessive pronoun his, and hence it is 
important to examine the history of the form in question, though this cannot 
be done satisfactorily without recurring to manuscript authorities inaccessible 
to the American scholar. 

The s or 's cannot be proved to represent, or stand for his, unless it can be 
shown that his was employed as the sign of the possessive case in English before 
the use of the ending s or 's. How far back then can we trace the employment 
of his for that purpose ? 

It is stated by Latham that the expression "for Jesus Christ his sake," in the 
Liturgy of the English Church, is "the only foundation for the assertion" 
that the genitive characteristic s is a contraction of the possessive pronoun his. 
The meaning of the grammarian is not clear, but if he intends to say, as he 
seems to do, that this form of the possessive is not older than that liturgy, he 
is certainly in error, although indeed the revived use of it cannot be positively 
traced to a much earlier period. 

There is, so far as I am aware, no evidence of the employment of the pos- 
sessive pronoun as a possessive sign in any stage of classical Anglo-Saxon. A 
large proportion of the nouns in that language, composing the second and third 
declension of Rask, the first of Klipstein, made the genitive or possessive in e s , 
or sometimes a s , and even y s , and in the transition to English, s or 's be- 
came the general possessive form for nouns of all the declensions. In the old- 



348 NOTE. [Lect. xvra. 

est manuscript of Layamon, the last important Anglo-Saxon, or rather Semi- 
Saxon work — a manuscript of the early part of the thirteenth century, and proba- 
bly nearly of the author's time — there are two examples of the use of his as 
the sign of the possessive of proper names. In another text, written, as is sup- 
posed, fifty years later, h i s is generally substituted for the e s of the older 
manuscript, and is used, in a few cases, even with common nouns ; but it is 
remarkable, that in the two instances where the older text has his, (I. pp. 175, 
279,) the corresponding passages in the later have the regular possessive in e s . 
In the Ormulum, which I think must be regarded as English rather than 
Semi-Saxon, and if so, then the earliest specimen of English, the possessive of 
nouns, as well as the plural number, is formed by the addition of s, (or rather, 
in accordance with the peculiar orthography of the author, of two ss,) without 
the apostrophe, and the pronoun never supplies its place. In the proclamation 
of Henry III., (1258,) the possessive is made in s or es. In Eobert of Glouces- 
ter, at least in Hearne's edition of 1724, the possessive is almost invariably 
formed by the addition of 's or e's to the radical, but there are a very few cases 
where ys is used as the possessive sign, and printed separately from the noun. 
Thus, at page 64 : 

f>e hauene f>er he was y slawe, aftur Haym ys name y wys, 
Hamptone was y clepud, as he yet y clepud ys. 

The pronoun his is printed in this edition, indifferently, Ms, hys, and ys, and 
therefore in the example I have cited, ys may possibly be a pronoun, but the 
mere separation of this syllable from the root in the manuscript does not prove 
it to be so, for the participial and preterite augment y, as in y slaice, y clepud 
in the above couplet, the prefix M, as in M het, oi leue, bi com, bi gan, the prefix 
a, (Latin ad,) as in scent for assent, and in a passage from a different manu- 
script, p. 611, the plural sign is in apeny is, are separated from the root. 

Besides this example from Robert of Gloucester, I find in that writer two 
other instances of the separation of the syllable ys from the root in the posses- 
sive case : 

The kyng tok Brut ys owne body, in ostage as it were, — p. 13. 
And after Brut ys owne nome he clepede it Bretagne, — p. 22. 

There are many similar cases in the Continuation of Eobert of Gloucester 
printed in the appendix to Heme's edition, and written apparently about the 
middle of the fifteenth century. Thus : "Sir John is tyme," p. 589 ; " In the 
V. Kyng Henry is tyme," p. 593 ; " through God is grace," p. 595 ; and the use 
of the pronoun Ms as a possessive sign is frequent in Hardyng, who is sup- 
posed to have finished his chronicle about 1465, though he most usually em- 
ploys the regular possessive in s. Thus, reprint of 1812, p. 156 : " In the year 
of Christ his incarnation." P. 226 : "and putte hym whole in God his high 
mercye." And in the continuation of 1543, p. 436, " Kynge Henry the VI. 
hys wife." 

In Gower, Conf. Am., Pauli., iii. 356, is a passage where his may be a pos- 
sessive sign : 

To holde love Ms covenaunt ; 

but it is possible that love may here be used as a dative, to hold to love his 
covenant, his requirement or stipulation. 



Lect. xvni.] NOTE. 349 

No example of this construction has been observed in Piers Ploughman, 
Chaucer, or the Wycliffite versions, but three apparent instances occur in Tor- 
rente of Portugal, at verses 380, 1384, and 1902 ; the devylle ys hed, But it be 
for Jhesu is sake, and ffor Jeshu is love. These, however, are inconclusive, 
for the same reason as those cited from Eobert of Gloucester. The ending in 
ys is often found about this period, in pronouns where it could not have been 
derived from his or Jiys, as in one of the Paston Letters, (Vol. I., 46,) writ- 
ten in 1470, in which Iters is spelt hyrrys, and ours, howrys, and the plural of 
nouns very often takes this ending. The form " my Lord Bedford ys godes," 
in the Paston Letters, I. 122, "to my Maistr ys place," I. 198, are probably 
mere orthographical errors, as they are contrary to the almost uniform usage 
in that collection. 

In the Morte d' Arthur, first printed in 1485, tenth book, chapter thirty-fifth, 
I find this passage : "Beware, Kynge Marke, and come not nyghe me, for wete 
thou wel that I saued Alysander his lyf," and there is a more equivocal instance 
in the seventh chapter of the fourth book : " This lord of this castel his name 
is Sir Damas." In general, the possessive is formed in this work as in modern 
times, but always without the apostrophe. 

The earliest examples I have met with of the free and constant use of his as 
a possessive sign are in the continuation of Fabyan's Chronicle, commencing 
with the reign of Henry VIII. and printed in 1542, pp. 696, 699, 701, 702, and 
elsewhere, of Ellis's reprint, but it is remarkable that in the previous parts of 
that Chronicle, this construction does not occur. 

In the Confutacyon of Tyndale's Aunswere, made anno 1532, by Syr Thomas 
More, p. 343 of the edition of 1557, I find this passage, " him have they sette 
on saynt Mathie hys even by the name of Saynt Thomas the Martyr " ; and on 
p. 597, "for conclusion of David hys dedes." It is possible that the form of 
the possessive may, in these instances, have been changed by the editor, so as 
to accord with the new usage, but if genuine, they date further back than the 
examples from Fabyan's Chronicle. 

An instance of the use of the plural possessive pronoun as the sign of the 
possessive case of a noun occurs in a letter written in 1528, and printed at page 
44 of the Introduction to Bagster's English Hexapla : " I did promys him X 1. 
sterling to praie for my father & mother there sowles, and al cristen sowles." 
So in A Brcviate Touching the Order and Governmente of a Nobleman's House, 
1665, published by the Royal Society of Antiquaries, Vol. XIII. , p. 330 : "He 
is to see into the baker and bruer their offices," &c. 

Fuller, Worthies, II. 327, has : "Without the help of Ariadne her Clue of 
silk," &c. 

These examples, indeed, prove nothing directly with regard to the origin of 
the possessive sign s, but these instances and those cited from Layamon, the 
Morte d' Arthur, Fabyan, and More, show that the possessive pronoun was, to 
some extent, regarded as the grammatical equivalent of the possessive sign, 
before the date of the English Liturgy. 

Doubtless the number of such examples might be increased by further re- 
search, but they are too few and too much at variance with the almost uni- 
versal usage of the language before the sixteenth century, and its known his- 
torical etymology, to serve as a foundation for a grammatical theory. If they 
are any thing more than accidental departures from the regular form, they, at 



350 NOTE. [Leot. xvin. 

most, only prove that particular English writers confounded the possessive 
pronoun with the possessive sign. Even this conclusion is rendered less probable 
by the fact that no instance of the corresponding use of her, or, with the single 
exception which I have cited from the letter of 1528, of their, is known to occur 
until about 1560. Palsgrave expressly says that the possessive is formed by 
adding s (or is) to the noun ; and he does not himself in any case employ the 
pronoun for this purpose, nor does Gil in his Logonomia, notice any but the 
inflected possessive. The apostrophe before the s in Robert of Gloucester was 
probably introduced to make the distinction between the possessive singular 
and the plural number, a device, which, when the new plural form in s was 
hardly yet colloquially established, might be a convenience, if not a necessity. 

Upon the whole, then, I think we are authorized to say that the theory which 
makes the possessive sign s a derivative or contraction of the possessive pro- 
noun his, in English etymology, is without historical evidence or probable 
analogy to support it. 

I regret that I have been unable to consult two articles mentioned by Sir F. 
Madden, in the Glossarial Remarks to Layamon, Vol. III., p. 451, one in the 
Critical Review for 1777, vol. XLIII., p. 10, the other in the Cambridge Phil. 
Museum, Vol. II. , as a simple reference to them might perhaps have saved a 
discussion which the statement of Latham and the opinions of some other 
grammarians seemed to render necessary. 



LECTURE XIX. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE ART OF PEINTING. 



The material conditions to which the art of book-making in 
all its branches is subject, have not only been powerfully instru- 
mental in the modification of single words, and in determining 
those minor questions upon which the ready and commodious use 
of a written or printed volume depends, but they have exerted an 
important influence upon the more general forms of literature, 
and even upon the character and tendency of mental action. Let 
me illustrate by a comparison between the ancient and modern 
methods of recording the processes and results of human thought. 
The oldest manuscripts have scarcely a single point of resemblance 
to modern books. The Latin word volumen, (whence our 
volume?) derived from the verb v o 1 v o , I turn or roll, indicates 
the most usual form of the ancient book. It was a long, narrow 
roll of parchment or papyrus generally divided transversely into 
pages or columns, the words written closely together without any 
separation by spaces, without distinctive forms of letters, capitals 
being employed for all purposes alike, without marks of punctua- 
tion, without divisions of chapters, paragraphs, or periods, and 
frequently made still more illegible by complicated and obscure 
abbreviations or contractions of whole syllables, or even words, into 
a single character. The modern book* is an assemblage of leaves, 

* It may not be here irrelevant to make a remark or two on the etymology of 
the Latin and English words for book. Volumen, derived as I have just 
said from v o 1 v o , is a younger and less common Latin name for book than 
either liber, the generic term for all books, or codex, properly the spe- 
cific designation of manuscripts composed of leaves of any material, while 
volumen was the appellation of the roll. The word liber, (whence our 
library,) originally signifying the inner bark of trees, was applied to books, 
because bark was one of the earliest materials on which the Latin people 

(351) 



352 ANCIENT BOOKS. [Lect. xix. 

of convenient form and dimensions, securely united at one edge, 
with pages regularly numbered, impressed with characters of differ- 
ent but fixed forms, according to their several uses, words separa- 
ted by spaces, members of the periods, and the periods themselves 
distinguished by appropriate points, and the whole cut up into 
paragraphs, sections, and chapters, according to the natural divi- 
sions of the subject, or the convenience of the writer, printer, or 
reader, and, finally, abundantly provided with explanatory notes 
and references, and ample tables of contents and indexes. Ancient 
manuscripts were, as a rule, without notes, but copyists or later 
possessors sometimes introduced in the margin explanatory glosses. 
Conventional signs or characters were also sometimes made use of 
by way of notes. 

To an unpractised eye, however familiar with the individual 
characters, an ancient manuscript or inscription presents but a con- 
fused and indistinct succession of letters, and no little practice is 
required to enable us readily to group these letters into syllables, 
the syllables into words, and to combine the words into separate 
periods. Indeed, the accidental omission of a space in printing 
between two successive words in our own language sometimes 

wrote. Codex, or caudex, whence our code, signifies the trunk or stem 
of a tree. Thin tablets of wood, split from the stem and covered with a layer 
of wax, at a very early period supplied the place of the more modern papy- 
rus, parchment and paper, the writing being inscribed upon the wax with a 
hard point or style. 

The Gothic tribes also used slips of wood for the same purpose, and the 
wood of the beech being found best adapted for writing-tablets, its primitive 
name (in Anglo-Saxon, b o c ,) became the designation of the most important 
object formed from it, and hence our English book, and the German Buch. 
According to Weigand this was originally BucJislab, because the Runic signs 
used for lots or prophecies were carved on twigs or slips of nut-bearing trees, 
and especially of the beech. It is a probable suggestion, that the form now 
universally adopted for the book owes its origin to the employment of wood 
or of leaden tablets in this way. Slips of wood could not well make a roll, 
and if connected at all, they would naturally be gathered like leaves of modern 
paper. The Upsal copy of the Mceso-Gothic translation of the Gospels, gen- 
erally known as the Codex Argenteus — believed to be of the fifth, or 
beginning of the sixth century, and one of the oldest parchments existing — is 
written on leaves of vellum arranged in book-fashion, as are also most of the 
Greek and Latin manuscripts now extant, the superior convenience of that 
form having led to its general adoption not far from the commencement of the 
Christian era, though the Herculanean and Egyptian papyri are all rolls. 



Lect. xix.] FOEMS OF BOOKS. 353 

seriously embarrasses us, aud if a whole sentence were thus printed, 
we should find it almost as unintelligible as a complicated cipher.* 
An ancient scholar, on the other hand, would be hardly less 
puzzled, were he to be asked to read a composition, even of his 
own, divided and arranged according to the rules of modern 
typography. He would be distracted with the variety of charac- 
ters, capitals, small letters, and italics, with the multiplicity of 
marks of punctuation, and the shattering of the periods into frag- 
mentary members ; perplexed with the often illogical divisions of 
the sentences and chapters, and embarrassed by the constant re- 
currence of references and annotations, all which would seem to 
him to serve little other purpose than to break the continuity of 
argument or narration, and to divert the attention of the reader 
from closely following the thoughts of his author. We may find 
an illustration of this in the unhappy dislocation and confusion of 
the Scripture narratives, by the division into chapter and verse, 
so injudiciously made at an early period and unwisely followed in 
all the later translations. A striking instance of the confusion 
caused by these divisions will be found in the Book of Joshua, 
Chaps, v. vi. By separating these chapters, the fact that the 1st 
verse of chap. vi. is merely parenthetical is not noticed, and, con- 
sequently, the identity of the ' captain of the Lord's host' in 
verses 14 and 15 of chap, v., and of the speaker in verse 2d of 
chap, vi., is entirely lost sight of. The Book of Isaiah has also 
suffered greatly in its prophetic unity from these purely me- 
chanical divisions, and indeed if we read the Gospels as they were 
written, each as a continuous whole, we gain a very different im- 
pression from that derived from perusing them as we habitually 

* The following sentence from Fuller's Worthies, Vol. I., p. 59, will serve to 
show the difficulty of reading an unbroken succession of words : 

Itwillposethebestclerktoreadyeatospellthatdeedwheiieinsentenc 
esclauseswordsandlettersarewithoutpointsopvstopsallcontlnuedtog 

ETHER. 

Even now advertisements are sometimes thus printed to attract attention, as 
for example : 

T UXURIANTWHISKERSMOUSTACHIOS,&c. — Allyoungmenshouldse 
-■— ' ndnameandaddressto Mr. Latreille, Lorrimore-street, Walworth, andreceive 
freeofchargefullparticularsoftheonlypreparationwhichhasproveditselfaproduce 
rofwhiskersandmoustachiostogetherwithfivehundredtestimonialsfrompersonsw 
hohaveusedthearticle. 



354 ILLEGIBILITY OF MANUSCRIPT. [Leot. xix. 

do, in fragmentary sections and periods. In fact, the restoration 
of the ancient integrity of form, is almost the only change winch 
most scholars would willingly see made in our English New 
Testament. 

Manuscript, indeed, even in our own language, can never be 
read in the thoughtless, half -mechanical way, in which we skim 
over the pages of a modern romance, or the columns of a news- 
paper, for the finest, clearest, and most uniform chirography falls 
short of the regularity and easy legibility of typography, and the 
highest compliment we can pay a hand-writing is to say that it 
reads like print.* 

The Oriental nations, whose manuscripts resemble those of the 
ancients in wanting capitals, italics, and punctuation, are leisurely 
readers, and as they follow the writing with the eye, they very 
frequently articulate the words, or at least move the lips, as we 
are apt to do in deciphering a difficult chirography. Indeed, such 
is the difficulty of reading manuscript so penned, that in cases 
where etiquette or other reasons require a written instead of a 
verbal message, the letter is sometimes accompanied by a reader 
to explain its purport to the recipient. A curious passage in the 
Confessions of St. Augustine seems to imply that the ancients 
usually articulated the words in their private reading ; for it is 
remarked as a noteworthy particular in the habits of St. Ambrose, 
that he read by the eye alone, when engaged in private study, f 

* The press of the day reports that the Chancellor Bismarck refused to accept 
a present of German books printed in Roman letter, alleging that they were 
less easily read than the monkish character commonly employed in Germany. 
This must have been a mere concession to a foolish national prejudice. The 
individual letters of the character commonly used in Germany, are almost as 
ill-discriminated as are the Armenian, and they are very destructive to the eye- 
sight. It is true that long practice enables a German to decipher these crooked 
and confused signs more readily than a stranger can do, but, other things be- 
ing equal, persons alike familiar with both sets of characters, can read books 
printed in the common Roman alphabet with far greater facility than when its 
mediaeval representative is used. In scientific treatises the Germans themselves 
are fast abandoning this ungraceful type, and adopting the simpler forms 
generally used in Europe. 

f Do we ordinarily think by audible images of spoken words, or by visual 
ones of their written representatives ? I have speculated much on this subject, 
and have found in my own case that the answer must depend on my personal 
habits at the time. "When I read many hours a day, I find that my thoughts 



LECT. xix.] MODEEN HABITS OF THOUGHT. 355 

" When Ambrose was reading," says Augustine, " his eye 
passed over the page, and his mind searched out the sense of his 
author, but his organs of speech were silent. We often saw him 
studying in this inaudible way, and never otherwise, and we sup- 
posed that he feared, that if he read aloud, he should be inter- 
rupted by those who heard him with questions about the mean- 
ing of obscure passages ; or, perhaps, the desire of sparing his 
voice, which was easily fatigued, was a still better reason for this 
silent study." * 

But the ancient habits of thought were wholly irreconcilable 
with the inconsecutive, discontinuous style of relation or discus- 
sion and expression so prevalent in our time. Sententious, in- 
deed, and highly elliptical the classical writers often were, but 
the thoughts were nevertheless consequent, and logically con- 
nected, though some links of the chain might be left to the read- 
er's sagacity to supply. Besides this, the fullness of the ancient 
inflections was a sure guide through the intricacies of the most 
involved period, and hence the Greeks and Romans did not re- 
quire those multiplied helps to easy reading which shallow think- 
ing demands, and the habitual use of which so weakens the intel- 
ligence, that a constant craving for additional facilities is felt, and 
every year adds some new device for relieving the brain, at the 
expense of the eyesight, in the mechanical arrangement of re- 
corded words. That this ocular dissection, this material anatomy 
of language, has had an important influence on our modern 
European tongues, and on the current of the thought of which 
those languages are the vehicles, there is little doubt. It is true, 
that in the decline of ancient literature, the convenience of such 
devices, superfluous in more intellectual ages, began to be felt, 
especially in the reading of older authors whose dialect was be- 



are a mental reproduction of written words ; at other times they are a succes- 
sion of imaginary sounds. The deaf and dumb think by signs, or rather by 
mental images of signs, and I have been told by a distinguished teacher of 
these unfortunates that he himself habitually thought in the sign language, 
and that his own children could follow his thoughts, when he was in a ' brown 
study ' by observing his incipient but unconscious sign movements — just as we 
often read the thoughts of those around us in the unconscious motions of their 
lips. 

*Conf. Lib. vi., 8 3. 



356 ANCIENT TEACHING. [Lect. xix. 

coming more or less obsolete. The invention of many of them is 
due to the Alexandrian grammarians, a school of critics and com- 
mentators who occupied themselves much with the elucidation of 
the earlier Greek writers, and who are said to have introduced 
the Greek accents, and some other points, to f acilitate the teach- 
ing of the language to foreigners, as well as the instruction of the 
young in reading. Their obvious adaptation to this purpose nat- 
urally secured them a ready reception in primary schools and 
higher seminaries ; and in fact, as we learn from Dionysius of 
Halicarnassus, the difficulty of learning to read manuscript was 
so great, that it was necessary for the pupil to receive some gram- 
matical instruction before taking reading lessons, obviously to en- 
able him the more readily to separate an unbroken period into its 
component words. " We begin," says Dionysius (de Admir. vi 
die. in Demosthene, 52), " by committing to memory the names 
of the elements of speech called letters." * " After learning these 
names, we are taught the forms and powers of the single letters, 
then their combination into syllables, and the conditions which 
affect syllables. Having mastered these elements, we learn the 
parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, conjunctions, and the like ; 
and when we are able to distinguish these, then we begin to write 
and to read, pronouncing the words slowly at first, and syllable 

*Athenaeus, citing Callias, (X., 79, p. 453,) informs us that the names of 
the letters, and even the spelling of syllables, were arranged metrically, doubt- 
less as a help to the memory. 

Eot' a'X(pa ) ft/jra, yafi/ia, dsTiTa, -&eov reap 1 eZ, &c. 

See Becker, Charicles, II., 33. 

Many attempts have been made to trace or to divine the history of alphabets, 
but in general with very doubtful success, and whatever the origin of alpha- 
bets may have been, they, and all other pictorial representations of articulate 
sounds, must be considered as now purely arbitrary. The Cherokee Guest's 
remarkable alphabet for writing his native tongue was composed of letters and 
other characters which he found in American books and newspapers ; but as 
he had never learned to read, the values that he assigned to those characters 
had no relation to their force in English. His alphabet was syllabic, and the 
structure of the Cherokee language is such that eighty -three symbols sufficed 
to express all the syllabic combinations of elementary sounds in that speech. 
That Guest, in selecting particular symbols as representative of special sounds, 
was guided by some obscure or fancied analogy between the sign and the 
articulation, cannot be doubted ; but as the detailed history of the invention 
perished with the inventor, we cannot now trace the successive steps of the 
mental processes followed by him. 



Lect. xix.] PUNCTUATION". 357 

by syllable, until rendered familiar .by practice." The introduc- 
tion of marks of punctuation into Latin manuscript was specially 
favored by the inflexible character of the Latin language, which 
inexorably demands a periodic structure, and, like a true peda- 
gogue, pedantically insists that the reader shall parse every word, 
in order to master the sentence. Once employed, they become 
indispensable. Beginning with air-bladders, we never learn to 
swim without them. Every parenthesis must have its landmarks, 
every turn of phrase its finger-post. We think by commas, semi- 
colons, and periods, and the free movements of a Demosthenes 
or a Thucydides are as unlike the measured, balanced tread of a 
modern orator or historical narrator, as is the flight of an eagle to 
the lock-step of a prison convict, or to the march of a well-drilled 
soldier, who can plant his foot only at the tap of the drum.* We 
are not content with a punctuation which marks the beginning 
and end of a period, separates its members, and distinguishes 
parenthetical qualifications. We require that it shall indicate the 
rhetorical character of the sentence. If it is vocative, ejaculatory, 
optative, interjectional, it must hoist an exclamation-point as a 
signal. If it is hypothetical or interrogative, it must announce 
itself by a mark of interrogation ; and the Spaniards carry the 
point so far that, in their typography, these signs precede as well 
as follow the sentence. 

There is a necessity, or at least an apology, for the use of punc- 
tuation in most modern languages, English especially, but which 
applies with less force to Greek and Latin. f I refer to the oth- 
erwise inevitable obscurity of long sentences, in languages where 
the relations of the constituent words are not determined by in- 
flection but almost wholly by position. The use of commas, 
semicolons, and brackets, supplies the place of inflections, and en- 
ables us to introduce, without danger of equivocation, qualifica- 
tions, illustrations, and parenthetical limitations, which, with our 
English syntax, would render a long period almost unintelligible 

* See p. 70 ante, note. 

f Even in Latin we may notice that the meaning is sometimes left doubtful 
where our modern device of Italicizing would have made it perfectly clear. 
Take for instance the following extract from Julian, Misopogon : "Ego olim 
eram in hibernis apud caram Lutetiam [sic] enim Galli Parisiorum oppidum 
appellant. " Is it caram or Lutetiam that is to be emphasized here ? 



358 MECHANICAL CONDITIONS. [Lect. xix. 

unless its members were divided by marks of punctuation. With- 
out this auxiliary, we should be obliged to make our written style 
much more disjointed than it now is, the sentences would be cut 
up into a multitude of distinct propositions, and the leading 
thought consequently often separated from its incidents and its ad- 
juncts. The practice of thus framing our written style cannot 
but materially influence our use of language as a medium of un- 
spoken thought, and, of course, our habits of intellectual concep- 
tion and ratiocination. It is an advantage of no mean importance 
to be able to grasp, in one grammatical expression, a general 
truth, with the necessary limitations, qualifications, and conditions 
which its practical application requires and the habitual omission 
of which characterizes the shallow thinker ; and hence the invo- 
lution and concentration of thought and style, which punctuation 
facilitates, are valuable as antidotes to the many distracting influ- 
ences of modern social life. On the other hand, the principles of 
punctuation are subtle, and an exact logical training is requisite 
for the just application of them. A perfect punctuation would 
represent natural pauses, and would be as properly a part of or- 
thography as are letters which represent sounds. The same re- 
mark applies to accent. Naturally, then, mistakes in the use of 
points, as of all the elements of language written or spoken, are 
frequent, so much so in fact, that, in the construction of private 
contracts and even of statutes, judicial tribunals do not much re- 
gard punctuation, and some eminent jurists have thought that 
legislative enactments and public documents should be without it. 
As a guide to the intonation in reading aloud, in a language which 
has so few grammatical landmarks as English, it is invaluable ; for 
it is as true in our days as it was in Chaucer's, that — 

A reader that pointeth ill 

A good sentence may oft spill. 

The art of printing has its special conditions and limitations, 
which have affected language in a variety of ways. Every per- 
son who writes for publication finds that the form and arrange- 
ment of his matter must often be controlled by what are called 
'printer's reasons'; and similar considerations of mechanical ne- 
cessity, convenience, routine, or prejudice, exert a still more im- 
portant influence on questions of punctuation, orthography, and 



Lect. xix.] MECHANICAL CONDITIONS. 359 

even expression. The matter of the writer, or ' copy,' as it is 
technically called, mnst be accommodated to the space to be filled, 
and abridged or extended accordingly. If you volunteer to en- 
lighten your fellow-citizens through the pages of a Daily, you 
may be told that but half a column can be spared for your article, 
and you must consent to cut down your lucubrations to that 
standard, or allow them to be printed in a crowded and micro- 
scopic type. If you are a regular contributor to a magazine or a 
newspaper, you may be called upon to extemporize twenty lines 
of small pica, or to decide which stanza of your poem shall be 
omitted, that it may not overrun the page ; and when you pub- 
lish a book, you may be requested to confine your prehminary 
tete-a-tete with your reader to the exact limits of the printer's 
' form.' 

In the early history of printing, books sometimes underwent 
strange changes from analogous causes. Fonts of type were often 
so small that a large volume was necessarily distributed among 
several offices to be printed. It would in this case be impossible 
to determine precisely how many printed pages a given quantity 
of manuscript would fill, and of course the printer who took the 
latter portion of the copy, must labor under a good deal of un- 
certainty as to the paging and signatures of his sheets. Hence, 
there would sometimes occur a considerable break between the 
last page of the first part, and the first page of the second, and 
this must either be left with an unseemly and suspicious blank or 
filled up with new or extraneous matter. Thus, in John Smith's 
Generall Historie of Yirginia, 1624, there occurred in this way a 
hiatus of ten pages, and the author partially fills it with compli- 
mentary verses addressed to him by several friends, making this 
apology for their introduction : 

" Now seeing there is this much Paper here to spare, that you 
should not be altogether cloyed with Prose ; such Yerses as my 
worthy Friends bestowed upon JSTew England, I here present 
you, because with honestie I can neither reject nor omit their 
courtesies." 

In like manner the editor of Fuller's "Worthies, published in 
1662, excuses the irregularity of the paging by saying that, " the 
discounting of Sheets to expedite the work at severall Presses hath 
occasioned the often mistake of the Folios"; and in Abel Pedi- 



360 MECHANICAL CONDITIONS. [Lect. xix. 

vivus, 1651, an erroneous computation, as to the space which 
manuscript would require, compelled the leaving* of ten folios 
unpaged between page 440 and page 441, from which point an- 
other press had undertaken the printing. Like blanks may be 
observed in ancient manuscripts, and they often seem to have 
been filled up by subsequent possessors with wholly irrelevant 
matter.* 

It is, however, mainly in smaller matters, that the me- 
chanical influence of the press is most conspicuous, if not most im- 
portant. Not only what in the nomenclature of the art are called 
i forms ' — that is, the number of pages inclosed in a single frame 
and printed at one operation on one piece of paper — but the 
dimensions of the page, and, in printing prose, the length of the 
lines also, are inflexible, and our equally rigid characters cannot 
be crowded, superposed, or indefinitely extended by lengthening 
their horizontal lines, f as they are in Oriental books, to fit them to 
the breadth of the page, but if there is a deficiency or an excess 
of matter, something must be added or omitted. Modern inge- 
nuity, it is true, has contrived methods of accommodation, or, to 
.use a word characteristic of our times, of compromise, by which 
appearances may often be saved without a too palpable sacrifice of 
the author's, or rather printer's, principles of orthography and 
punctuation. But, at a somewhat earlier stage of the art, the con- 
venience of the compositor overruled all things, and in spite of 
the improvements to which I have just alluded, there are few 
writers who do not even now sometimes suffer from the despotism 
of that redoubtable official. 

At the period when bur language was in a more flux and un- 
settled condition, and the press was a less flexible instrument, if 
the words of the manuscript did not correspond exactly to the 
length of a line, and the difficulty could not be remedied by the 
insertion or omission of printer's spaces, without leaving staring 
blanks or a crowded condition of the words at once distasteful to 
a typographic eye and perplexing to the reader, a comma might 
be dropped or introduced, a capital exchanged for a small letter, 

* See Wattenbach, Hand-ScTiriften-Kunde, p. 254. 

fin the Malmantile Bacguistato, Florence, 1688, and in the curious lying 
Life of the Jesuit Anchieta, Rome, 1738, the letters a, e, and n, are elongated 
by a horizontal stroke at bottom when necessary to fill a space. 



Lect. xix.] UNIFOEMITY OF OKTHOGEAPHY. 361 

or vice versd. So if the author used a word the spelling of which 
was not well settled, (and all modern orthography was doubtful 
three hundred years ago,) a letter or two might be added or omit- 
ted, to give it the proper length. This is the explanation of much 
of the irregular orthography which occurs in the older, and some- 
times in more recent, editions of printed books. The ingenuity 
of more modern printers, as I have already observed, has devised 
methods of removing or greatly lessening this embarrassment, 
chiefly by the dexterous use of spaces ; and the convenience of 
spelling and punctuating according to a uniform standard so 
greatly overbalances the difficulty of accommodating the matter 
to the page, that authors now complain, not that the printer's or- 
thography is too variable, but that it is tyrannically inflexible. 
Landor, in his second conversation between Johnson and Tooke, 
tells us that Hume's orthography was overruled by his printers. 
He wrote the preterites and past participles of the weak verbs 
with a t final, as Milton did, as, for example, lookt for looked, 
but in his printed works, the compositor and publisher would 
suffer no such departure from the established laws of the chapel. 
An eminent French philological writer, when accused of violat- 
ing his own principles of orthography in one of his printed essays, 
thus replies : "It was not I that printed my essay, it was Mr. 
Didot. Now Mr. Didot, I confess it with pain, is not of my opin- 
ion with regard to the spelling of certain plurals, and I cannot 
oblige him to print against his conscience and his habits. You 
know that every printing office has its rules, its fixed system, from 
which it will not consent to depart. For example, I think the 
present f ashion of punctuation detestable, because the points are 
multiplied to ridiculous excess. Well, I attempt to prove this by 
precept and example, and the very printers who publish my argu- 
ment scatter points over it, as if they were shaken out of a pepper- 
box. It is their way. What would you have ! They will print my 
theory only on condition that I will submit to their practice P * 

The early printers were very often learned men, and had there- 
fore a much better right to control the orthography of their 
authors than have those of our day, who are seldom competent to 
form any opinion on the subject, except so far as regards the con- 

* Geiiin, Recreations Philologiques, I. 355. 
16 



362 UNIFORMITY OF ORTHOGRAPHY. [Lect. xix. 

venience of their art, or rather their trade. The old typographers 
indeed seem to have exercised supreme authority on this point, 
and even as late as near the beginning of the seventeenth century 
Rosweyde* submitted implicitly to their control. 

Habits of spelling soon become fixed. A bad speller cannot 
accurately copy a well-spelled manuscript, and if the apprentices 
in an office were not rigorously trained to an invariable system of 
spelling, the trouble they would occasion the proof-reader would 
be endless. Experience has shown that nothing is more difficult 
than to obtain an accurate reprint of an old edition, or the pub- 
lishing of an old manuscript with the original orthography ; and 
this is one reason why so many of the most valuable sources of 
information respecting the earlv forms and history of our lan- 
guage have never been made accessible by the press, and why later 
editors have rendered so many sterling old authors wholly value- 
less for all philological purposes, by changing or disguising their 
meaning, in the foolish attempt to fit them to the taste of the vul- 
gar reader by modernizing their spelling, and by conforming their 
supposed erroneous grammar to the practice of the hour. A writer 
of the present day, who quotes a couplet of Chaucer, must ex- 
pect that the printer will reform the orthography according to the 
latest edition of Webster, and if, in the indulgence of a passion 
for the archaic and the venerable, he venture to employ an old- 
fashioned form or an obsolescent word, the compositor, pitying 
his presumed ignorance or want of taste, will charitably amend 
the ' copy,' by substituting a word of a more current coinage. If, 
as has happened to the writer, he jestingly apply to a youth the 
old Euphuistic appellation of a juvenaZ, the printer will change his 
antiquated substantive into the adjective juvenile, and if he sing 
of a ' grisly ghost,' he may find his awe-inspiring, but somewhat 
vague epithet, rendered more precisely descriptive by being 
printed with two zz.\ 

Eminent printers usually adopt some popular dictionary as a 
standard, and they allow the writers for whom they print no 

* After professing to have adhered very strictly to his texts in spite of bar- 
barisms and solecisms, he says : " Adverte secundo, orthographic earn serva- 
tam rationem, quam Typographus optimam judicavit." Prolegomena in Vitas 
Patrum. P. lxxxv., Ed. 1628. 

f See two translations from Matthisson in the Whig Review for 1845. 



Lect. xrx.] printer's orthography. 363 

deviation from this authoritative canon. The dictionaries select- 
ed are often works of no real philological merit. The aim of 
their authors has been, not to present the language as it is, as the 
conjoined influence of uncontrollable circumstances and learned 
labor has made it, but as, according to their crude notions, it 
ought to be. Every word-collector aspires to be a reformer, and 
the corrections of popular orthography are more frequently 
based on false analogies and mistaken etymologies or erroneous 
principles of phonology, than founded in sound philological 
scholarship. In language, form is indistinguishable from sub- 
stance, or rather is substance. The dictionary-maker and the 
printer, who lord it over the form of our words, control the 
grammar of our language, and the philosophy of its structure ; 
they suggest wrong etymologies and thereby give a new shade of 
meaning to words ; and in short, exert over speech a sway not 
less absolute or more conducive to the interests of good taste and 
truth in language, than that which the modiste possesses in the 
fashion of dress.* 

It must be admitted that the licenses of which I complain are 
older than the art of printing. Professional scribes, in ancient 
times and in the Middle Ages, habitually conformed the manu- 
scripts they copied to the orthographical and grammatical stand- 
ard of their own times, and they regularly changed every obso- 
lete or obscure word or form of expression for something more 
agreeable to the taste, or less enigmatical to the intelligence of 
their contemporaries. They often corrected supposed errors in 
names, dates, facts, or if, instead of venturing upon absolute 
change, they more conscientiously inserted an explanatory gloss 
or conjectural emendation in the margin, a later copyist would 
incorporate the note or correction into the text. In manuscripts 
written in languages still spoken when a given copy f was made, 

* Caxton. in the title-page to his edition of Higden, (I am obliged to quote 
from a modernized version,) says the Chronicle was ' ' Imprinted by William 
Caxton, after having somewhat changed the rude and old English, that is to 
wit, certain words which in these days be neither used nor understanden." 
And in another place : "And now at this time simply imprinted and set in 
form by me, William Caxton, and a little embellished from the old making." 

f The etymology of oopy presents a striking instance of the extravagances 
into which inquirers, whose study of languages is confined to grammars and 



364 LICENSES OF COPYISTS. [Lect. xix. 

we can never expect a near conformity to the words of. the 
author, unless the writing is an original, or at least a contempo- 
raneous transcript ; and in the latter case, if the penman hap- 
pened to be of a different province from that of the writer, dia- 
lectic differences are almost sure to occur. Thus, the oldest 
manuscripts of Petrarch and Dante, and other Italian writers, 
seldom fail to betray the birthplace of the copyist, by the shib- 
boleth of his local dialect. In like manner, when we compare 
manuscripts of the same work copied in successive centuries, we 
can trace the changes of the language almost as distinctly as in 
different original compositions of the corresponding periods.* 

We find an additional proof of the frequency and extent of 
the license indulged in by ancient copyists, in the comparison 
of the dialect of monumental inscriptions with that of literary 
works which have come down from the same periods. Our 
classical manuscripts, excepting those found at Herculaneum, and 
in a few instances in Egyptian mummy-cases, are all compara- 
tively modern. The forms of language in Greek and Latin in- 
scriptions are generally much more archaic than in our copies of 

dictionaries, run, when they seek the origin of words, not in their history as 
traced in actual literature, but in resemblances gathered from lexicons. I 
find it stated in a well-known dictionary, that copy is from cope, in the sense 
of likeness. Under cope no such meaning is given, the nearest approach to it 
being, "to exchange or barter," but cope is said to be allied to the Arabic 
k a f a i , to be equal, to be like. 

Cope, in the sense of exchanging or buying, is neither more nor less than the 
Anglo-Saxon ceapian, to chaffer, bargain or trade, whence also our chap- 
man and cheap. Copy is the Latin c o p i a , signifying first, abundance, then 
facility or convenience, whence the phrase copiam facere alicujus, to 
furnish, grant, or communicate any thing, from which latter form came the 
sense of -'making a copy," as a mode of communicating a writing. 

* The manuscripts of Piers Ploughman vary so widely, that Whitaker 
could explain the discrepancies only by the supposition of a rifaccimento by 
the author himself, at a considerably later period, when his opinions had 
undergone important changes ; but a comparison of Whitaker's and "Wright's 
texts reveals so wide differences in grammar, vocabulary, and orthography, 
that it is quite unreasonable to refer the two recensions to one writer, and it 
is by no means improbable that both are very unlike the author's original. 

It is supposed that the two manuscripts of Layamon, so well edited by Sir 
F. Madden, do not differ more than half a century in their ages, but the de- 
partures of the later from the earlier text are too great to be accounted for, 
except by imputing to the copyist very great license in transcription. 



Lect. xix.] LICENSES OF COPYISTS. 365 

the works of contemporaneous writers. It is true, that some- 
thing of the difference is to be ascribed to the influence of what 
is called the lapidary style, and its consecrated standards of or- 
thography and expression. Inscriptions engraved on marble or 
on brass are necessarily brief, laconic, elliptical, and the rigidity 
of these materials produced on old monumental writings effects 
analogous, in some respects, to those of the mechanical condi- 
tions of printing upon modern literature. Other differences are 
accounted for by the ignorance of the stone-cutters ; but after 
all, it is not probable that inscriptions commemorating the public 
acts of officers of high rank, or other important events, and of 
course executed under a responsible inspection, would differ very 
widely from the current grammatical forms or orthography of 
their time, and hence we mast 'infer that copyists and editors 
have made considerable changes in the manuscripts they pub- 
lished. The professional scribes at Rome and Athens were often 
slaves, and, in the former city, no doubt generally much better 
educated than their masters. The booksellers kept numbers of 
such servile scribes, and many copies of a book were made at 
once, some one reading the manuscript aloud, and the penmen 
writing it down. Under such circumstances, independently of 
any deliberate purpose of modernizing or correcting the author, 
persons writing by the ear from dictation * would inevitably re- 
duce the work, whether old or new, to the standard orthography 
of the time, which they certainly might do with quite as good 
right as have editors in the nineteenth century to mangle and 
disguise good old authors, for the purpose of making them more 
intelligible to a public which they suppose as ignorant as them- 
selves. 

From all these circumstances, it is evident that nothing can 
assure us of possessing the ipsissima verba of an old writer but a 
comparison with the original manuscript, or one which has passed 
the author's revision. Happily for the interests of literature, 
early English writers did not always trust their works to the ten- 



* The reader will find in Goethe's Nachgelassene WerJce, B. V. S. 106, an 
amusing and instructive article on this subject, entitled Hor-Sclireib-und 
Druckfehler. 

See also Wattenbach, Handschrift-Kunde. 



366 CORRECTION OF MANUSCRIPTS. [Lect. xix. 

der mercies of the scribe with the superb indifference which 
Shakespeare is reported to have shown. Chaucer scrupulously 
revised the copies of his works, as appears from this address to 

his scribe : 

Adam Scrivener, if ever it thee befall, 
Boece or Troilus for to write new, 
Under thy long locks thou maist have the scall, 
But after my making thou write more trew.* 
So oft a day I mote thy werke renew, 
It to correct and eke to rubbe and scrape, 
And all is thorow thy negligence and rape. 

* Trench, Select Glossary, under Make, Maker, states that these words, "as 
applied to the exercise of the poet's art," and "as equivalent to poet," " are not 
found in any book anterior to the revival of the study of the Greek literature 
and language in England." It will hardly be said that the study of Greek 
was revived in England before the Reformation, or, in any event, in the four- 
teenth century. In the lines quoted from Chaucer, in the text, I think making 
must be used in this sense, as also by the same poet in several other passages ; 
as, for example, in these verses from the conclusion of the complaint of Mars 
and Venus, which have been quoted for another purpose, on p. 501 : 

And eke to me it is a great penaunce, 

Sith rime in English hath soch scarcite 

To folow, word by word, the curiosite 

Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce. 

There are several similar instances in the Legend of Good Women. Thus : 

Alas, that I ne had English rime, or prose 
Suffisaunt, this floure to praise aright, 
But helpeth, ye that han conning and might, 
Ye lovers, that can make of sentement ! 

The lines that follow these are entirely decisive as to the meaning of make 
in this passage, if indeed those just quoted leave any room for doubt. 

Again : 

The man hath served you of his conninges, 

And forthred well your law in his makinges, 

All be it that he can not well endite. 
So also 

He shal never more agilten in this wise, 

But shal maken as ye woll devise, 

Of women trewe in loving al hir life. 

But now I charge thee, upon thy life, 
That in thy legende thou make of this wife, 
Whan thou hast other smale ymade before. 

In Robert de Brunne's Prologue to his Chronicle, Hearne's ed., p. xcix., I 

find, 

I mad noght for no disours, 

Ne for no seggers, no harpours, &c. ; 



And, 



Lect. xix.] CORRECTION OF MANUSCRIPTS. 367 

The author of the Orniulum, one of the most interesting and 
valuable relics of our old literature, the original manuscript of 
which, written with a systematic uniformity of orthography very 
remarkable in the thirteenth century, is yet extant, gives this 
charge to the copyists who might attempt the multiplication of 
his work : 

& whase wilenn shall J iss t>oc 

Efft of>err sipe writenn, 
Himm bidde ice pat liet write rihht, 

Swa sumui piss boc himm taachepp, 
All pwerrt ut affterr patt itt iss 

TJppo piss firrste bisne, p 
"Wipp all swillc rime alls her iss sett, 

Wipp all se fele wordess ; 
& tatt he loke wel patt he 

An bocstaff write twiyyess, 
Eyywhser pser itt uppo piss boc 

Iss writenn o patt wise. 
Loke he well patt het write swa, 
Forr he ne mayy nohht elless 
Onn Ennglissh writenn rihht te word 
patt wite he wel to sope. 

and on p. c, 

pat may pou here in Sir Tristrem, 

Ouer gestes it has pe steem, 

Ouer all pat is or was, 

If men it sayd as made Thomas, &c. ; 



also on p. ci. 



For pis makyng I wille no mede, 
Bot gude prayere, when ye it rede. 



In Piers Ploughman, Vision, verse 7470, we have : 

And thow medlest with makynges 
And myghtest go saye thi Sauter ; 

and in verse 7483, 

To solacen hym some tyme, ^< 
As I do whan I make. 

Make occurs, in the same sense, in the Confessio Amantis of Oower, Pauli's 
ed., vol. iii., 384: 

My muse doth me for to wite 
And saith, it shall be for my beste, 
Fro this day forth to take reste, 
That I no more of love make, &c. 

See also notes to vol. i., of Dyce's edition of Skelton, p. 186, and passages 
there cited. 



368 TEXT OF SHAKESPEAEE. [Lect. XIX. 

Or, in more modern English : 

And whoso willeth this my book 

To write again hereafter, 
Him bid I, that he write it right, 

So as this book him teacheth, 
Throughout according as it is 

In this the first example, 
"With all such rhythm as here is set, 

With words, eke, just so many ; 
And let him look to it, that he 

Write twice each single letter, 
Wherever it, in this my book, 

In that wise is ywritten. 
Look he well that he write it so, 

For otherwise he may not 
In English write the words aright, 

That, wete he well, is soothfast. 

It is one of the most interesting questions in all literature, how 
far the original text of Shakespeare has suffered from the license, 
the negligence, or the indolence of those who, with type and pen, 
have multiplied his works. The dispute is likely to be a long 
one, and if Collier's folio does not prove the existence of myriads 
of errors in the current editions, it at least shows an alarming 
boldness of commentators in the way of conjectural emendation. 



LECTUEE XX. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE AET OF PRINTING. 

n. 

There are circumstances peculiar to the history of English lit- 
erature, which have rendered the mechanical conditions and im- 
perfections of the typographical art more powerfully influential 
upon the language itself, than was elsewhere, in general, the case. 
Caxton, the first English printer, was indeed both an Englishman 
by birth and a man of scholarly attainments, but he acquired the 
art at Cologne, and it is probable, though not certain, that his 
first production, " The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye," was 
printed either at Cologne or at Bruges. "When he established 
his press at Westminster soon after the year 1470, he brought 
over workmen from the continent, and, were stronger evidence 
wanting, the names of his successors, Lettou and Machlinia, 
Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, Berthelette, Faques, Treveris, 
would sufficiently indicate that they also were of foreign birth. 
Indeed it appears from Strype's Memoirs of Cranmer,* that as 
late as 1537, the printers in England were generally " Dutchmen 
that could neither speak nor write true English," and when Graf- 
ton applied for an exclusive privilege for the translation of the 
Bible which goes by his name, he represented that " for covet- 
ousness' sake, these foreign printers would not employ learned 
Englishmen to oversee and correct their work," so that, as he 
complains, "paper, letter, ink, and correction would be all 
naught." Three years later, Grafton asked permission to print 
the Bible at Paris, where he says that not only could he procure 
better and cheaper paper, but that the workmen were more skil- 

* See Souther's Common Place Book, Vol. II. 
16* (369) 



3T0 EARLY PRINTING IN ENGLAND. [Lect. xx. 

ful. Any one, who has had occasion to print so mnch as a fa- 
miliar quotation in a foreign tongue, can judge whether a volume 
printed in a language unknown to the compositor would be likely 
to prove very correct. Besides this, it must be remembered that 
the art of calligraphy had been less cultivated in England than on 
the continent, that the characters in common use differed some- 
what from those employed in the other European languages, and 
that the contractions and abbreviations stood, of course, for differ- 
ent combinations of sounds or letters. An instance of this is the 
employment of J) and 5 for the two sounds of th, in the Anglo- 
Saxon and Old-English alphabets, a trace of which long remained 
in the confounding of f) with y. In black-letter, the character y 
much resembles the f>, and hence y was often used instead of it, 
and this gave rise to the forms ye for the, and yt for that. Thus 
many circumstances combined to make an English manuscript ex- 
tremely illegible to a printer unacquainted with the language. 

While in almost every Continental country, the early printers 
were generally learned men, and sometimes among the most emi- 
nent scholars of their time, the followers of Caxton were for 
nearly two centuries principally mere handicraftsmen, and typog- 
raphy fell far short both of the dignity and the artistic perfec- 
tion to which it elsewhere attained almost immediately after its 
invention. For all these reasons it is obvious that early English 
printed books must have been very unfaithful copies of the manu- 
scripts they attempted to reproduce, and the great incorrectness 
of their execution had a prejudicial effect upon the forms of the 
language and sometimes on the meaning and use of important 
words. There is a large class of words of Latin and French 
origin belonging to the dialect of books, and at first, of course, 
used exclusively by literary men who could not be ignorant of 
their etymology or true orthography, but which are found very 
vaguely spelled in the printed books of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries. Thus, the printers did not discriminate be- 
tween emmeRt and imminent, jpresid&nt and precedent, ingeni- 
ous and ingenious, and these words were used or rather printed 
interchangeably almost to the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. A passage in Fuller, however, clearly marks the distinc- 
tion between ingenuousness and ingenm'ty as then recognized, 
and it is not probable that scholars could ever have been insensi- 



Lect. xx.] CONFUSION OF SPELLING. 371 

ble to the differences between all of them.* They must first 
have been confounded by typographical error. The confusion 
once introduced, educated men became involved in it, and it was 
long before the words and the ideas they expressed were disen- 
tangled from it. 

Printed books, however incorrect, would, from their greater 
legibility, always be preferred to manuscript, and their wide cir- 
culation would make them at once popular standards of authority 
in all matters of orthography and grammatical inflection. The 
confusion and irregularity of their spelling would accordingly 
powerfully tend to increase the uncertainty of orthography, es- 
pecially at a period when the usage of the learned even was dis- 
cordant, and the language still in process of formation. It is, no 
doubt, in these circumstances that we are to find the explanation 
of the otherwise paradoxical fact, that the spelling of the Eng- 
lish language, as practised by educated persons in the fifteenth, 
and even the latter part of the fourteenth century, more nearly 
resembles that of the present day than do the printed books of 
the sixteenth century. The foreign printers ignorantly cor- 
rupted the spelling of their copy, and their books, again, the 
orthography of the nation. f In carefully executed recent edi- 
tions, printed directly from very early manuscripts, we find a 
surprisingly close resemblance to the spelling of modern periods. 
In the best manuscripts of Chaucer, and more especially of Gow- 
er, and in some of the Paston Letters, as, for example, in a letter 



* Though men understood imperfectly in this life, yet if all understood 
equally imperfectly, upon the supposition of equal ingenuousness to their inge- 
nuity, (that is, that they would readily embrace what appears true unto them,) 
all would be of the same judgment. Infant's Advocate, Part II., p. 8. 

Does Trench, in treating of desynonymised words, (Study of Words, Lec- 
ture V. ,) mean to say that ingem'ous, (Latin ingeniosus, proximately from 
i n g e n i u m ,) and ingem*ous, (Latin i n g e n u u s , directly from the verbal 
root,) were ever really the same word ? 

f Et si, huic non absimile incommodum etiam accederet, ut prselo corri- 
gendo non doctus prseesset sed aliquis de grege mercatorum qui Germanic^ et 
Anglice loqui posset, corrumpi necesse erat orthographiam nostram ; et quia 
tempestiva medela adhibita non esset, in hominum usum corruptam transire. 
Atque hanc sane existimo unicam f uisse causam corruptelge. 

A. Gil. Logonomia Anglica, 2d edition, 1621. 
Praefatio ad Lectorem. 



372 CONFUSION OF SPELLING. (Lect. xx. 

of Lord Hastyngs written before the year 1480, we find indeed 
obsolete words, but the orthography of those which are still em- 
ployed conforms more closely to the present standard than does 
that of the English Bible of 1611.* The original edition of that 
translation furnishes abundant illustrations of a practice to which 
I referred in the last lecture, that, namely, of clipping or length- 
ening words according to the space which it was convenient to 
give them in arranging the printed lines. Thus in Deuteronomy 
ix. 19, hot is spelt whot, because a long word was required to fill 
out the space ; in Joshua ix. 12, Judges ii. 14, iii. 20, it is spelt 
hote, there being a smaller space to occupy, and in other passages, 
where the ordinary form hot was long enough, that spelling is 
employed. In verse 13, of chapter xiii. of Judges, ye and we 
are both printed with a single e, but in verse 15, of the same 
chapter, each with two ee. In verse 2 of chapter xv., the second 
person singular, imperfect tense of the verb to have, is spelt had- 
dest, in Genesis xxx. 30, hadst. In Genesis xxxi. 8, the future 
of the substantive verb to be is printed shall bee, with two 11 and 
two ee j but in chapter xxx., verse 33, it is printed in one word, 
shalbe, and both these forms occur in verse 17 of chapter xlii. of 
Isaiah, f So in the life of Reynolds in Abel Redivivus, in one 

* See letter from Lord Hastyngs, Pastoii Letters, II., 296. Pauli, in the 
Introductory Essay to his edition of Gower's Confessio Amantis, London, 
1857, states, that he has adopted the " judicious and consistent orthography " 
of a manuscript probably of the end of the fourteenth century, " as the basis 
for the spelling in this new edition." He also describes the orthography of a 
manuscript of the same author, of the fifteenth century, as having been " car- 
ried through almost rigorously according to simple and reasonable principles." 
Pauli's text is founded on an edition by Berthelette, of the year 1532, but con- 
formed in its orthography to the first manuscript above mentioned. Berthelette 
printed from an edition by Caxton, but substituted the dialect and spelling of 
his own time, and carried the process of modernization still farther in a sub 
sequent edition. In that from which Pauli printed, the ' ' orthography and 
metre had been disturbed in innumerable places by Berthelette," and he ob 
serves that in the oldest manuscripts, the promiscuous use of y and i, u and v, 
so common in all old English printed books, does not occur. The spelling of 
Pauli's edition, thus restored to its original integrity, is, in a very large pro- 
portion of the words, identical with that of the present day. 

f The following fac-simile from one of the two editions of 1611, shows the 
arrangement of two lines of the verse referred to, and the reason for it : 

17 <E ®lK2 t) a M b ee *tuntcb backe, I 
tl)e£ sljalbe Qtreatln astiatnefo, tl)at tntet I 



Lect. xx.] CONFUSION OF SPELLING. 373 

sentence college and knowledge are spelt without the e final, but 
in the next period, both words with it. These, and many more 
among the thousand similar variations in which early printed 
English books abound, were occasioned by the necessity of con- 
forming the length of the words to the space that could be spared 
for them. The double forms toward and towards, which occur 
in King James's Bible, are explained in the same way, as also 
the employment or omission of the final s in other words of the 
same ending in other English books of that century. It should, 
however, be here observed, that, in all the words ending in -ward, 
which are used in the first editions of that translation, with the 
exception of towards and afterwards, the s is constantly omitted, 
according to what seems to be the fashionable modern usage ; 
though, as I think, the s final ought to be retained in employing 
words with this ending as adverbs or prepositions, and dropped 
when they serve as adjectives. One of the most remarkable 
typographical licenses I have observed, occurs in the life of Ab- 
bot in Abel Redivivus, printed in 1651. At that period, our 
common title of address, Mister, was spelt, and doubtless pro- 
nounced, Master, and hence, though the same abbreviation was 
used for the address as at present, namely Mr., the two significa- 
tions of the word were liable to be confounded. The author of 
the life in question speaks of a particular work, as ■ Abbot's mas- 
ter-piece,' but the printer, for want of space, has printed the ab- 
breviation Mr., instead of the whole word master. A like ex- 
ample occurs in a letter from Harrington to Prince Henry in the 
Nugse Antiquse. In printing poetry, where the verses are sel- 
dom long enough to extend across the whole breadth of the page, 
the same necessity of adapting the words to the space did not ex- 
ist, and hence it is, that the spelling in old printed poems is some- 
times more uniform than in contemporaneous prose. In old edi- 
tions of Chaucer, we find the orthography of the versified por- 
tions less irregular than that of the Tale of Meliboeus, and of the 
Persones Tale, both of which are in prose. It should, however, 
be remembered, that, in poetry, there existed a totally different 
cause of irregularity, not connected with the mechanical laws of 
the press. I refer to the necessities of metre. The final e of 
words with that termination was in Chaucer's time usually pro- 
nounced, at least in verse, as it still is in French poetry, and ac- 



374 PKINTIISTG AND THE EEFOEMATION. [Lect. XX. 

cordingly where not strictly inflectional, it was employed or 
dropped according to metrical convenience. Besides this, at that 
period, the Saxon inflections had not become wholly obsolete, 
and early English writers used the e final, as a sign of the plural 
in adjectives, and verbs of the strong conjugation, which in our 
modern dialect admit no change of form in different numbers. 

The near coincidence in time, between the Protestant Pef orma- 
tion and the general diffusion of the art of printing in Europe, to- 
gether with the close analogy between the intellectual influences 
of both, makes it a matter of great difficulty in many cases to de- 
termine which of these two causes was most active in the produc- 
tion of particular effects; and especially, how far the change 
which the sixteenth century produced in all the European lan- 
guages is to be ascribed to the one or the other of them. The 
year 1500 found the English language much as Chaucer and 
Wycliffe had left it ; in the year 1600, it had nearly reached the 
point where it now stands, so far as concerns the dialects of the 
knowledges then cultivated, except in the vocabulary of the 
physical sciences. The Tale of Meliboeus and the Persones Tale 
differ from the Morte d' Arthur, in Caxton's edition, only as Eng- 
lish versions of moral and theological treatises in Latin would be 
expected to differ from an English translation of a French ro- 
mantic fiction; but, independently of the coloring which each 
receives from these influences and from the nature of the sub- 
jects, the language will be found to be very nearly the same. 
But if we compare either of them with Hooker or Shakespeare,' 
and again, the latter writers with the purest authors of the pres- 
ent day, we shall observe that the century between Caxton and 
Hooker effected as great changes as the two hundred and fifty 
years that have elapsed since that great writer flourished. Al- 
though printing was introduced into England about 1470, yet the 
productions of the press were not sufficiently numerous to exert 
much influence on the national mind or speech, until half a cen- 
tury later. During the sixteenth century, printing and the Ref- 
ormation promoted each other, and their action upon thought 
and language was a concurrent one. Without attempting to de- 
fine the relative weight of each, I may say that I think the most 
important single element, in producing the general effect of both 
upon the English language, was the diffusion of a knowledge of 



Lect. xx.] DIALECT OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTUEY. 375 

classical literature, which printing made possible, and the Refor- 
mation made more desirable. The increased number and the re- 
duced price of books in the Greek and Latin languages released 
classical literature from the confinement of the cloister, and pri- 
vate individuals of moderate means were now able to enjoy intel- 
lectual luxuries, which before had been accessible only to the 
wealth of monastic corporations. Manuscripts of the classics had 
been multiplied only for the exclusive use of those establishments, 
by monkish scribes who occupied their leisure hours in copying, 
or calligraphic and pictorial embellishment, of writings which had 
survived the wreck of yet more barbarous ages. The first tend- 
ency of this secularization of classic lore was undoubtedly unfa- 
vorable to the cultivation of the popular literature and the ver- 
nacular speech, but a reaction soon commenced, and a new litera- 
ture sprung up in the vulgar languages, though fashioned upon 
ancient models, affecting a classical structure, and marked by a 
Latinized phraseology. 

Until the end of the fifteenth century, it was only in the theo- 
logical and moral departments that Latin had much direct influ- 
ence upon English, most of the Latin roots introduced into it up 
to that time having been borrowed from the French ; * but as soon 
as the profane literature of Greece and Rome became known to 
English scholars through the press, a considerable influx of words 
drawn directly from the classics took place. The introduction of 
this element, like the infusion of fresh juice into ripened wine, 
produced a sort of fermentation in the English language, a strife 
between the new and the old, and both vocabulary and structure 
continued in a very unstable state until the end of the sixteenth 
century, when English became settled in nearly its present form. 
In the productions of Caxton's press, and indeed in the literature 
of the period down to and including the time of Lord Berners, 
whose translation of Froissart — perhaps the best English prose 
that had yet been written, and certainly the most delightful nar- 
rative work in the language — first appeared in 1523, it is scarcely 
possible to find a single word of Latin origin, belonging to the 
general vocabulary of English, whose form does not render it 
most probable that we received it through the French. A hun- 

* Many of our verbs of Latin origin are derived directly from the participial 
form, and not through, the French, as for example : corrupt, instruct, etc. 



376 FEEEDOM OF THE PEESS. [Lect. xx. 

dred years later, on the contrary, we meet on every printed page, 
words either taken directly from the Latin, or, which is a very 
important point, if before existing in onr literature, reformed in 
orthography so as to suggest their classical origin. There is even 
in Hooker an evident struggle between the two great elements of 
English, and in his hesitation between the Latin and the Saxon, 
or older English, he not unfrequently uses both, as for instance, 
" nocive or hurtful things," " unreasonable cecity and blindness" 
"rectiticde or straightness" "sense and meaning" • and so, in 
Cotta's Witchcraft, " heartened and encouraged" ; also, " idleness 
and otiosity" Preamble of a Statute of 24 Henry VIIL, quoted 
by Froude. 

The influence of printing upon the English language has been 
much extended and strengthened by two important circumstances, 
common to the two great countries of which it is the vernacular. 
The one is, that in neither does there exist, nor for two centuries 
has there existed, a censorship of the press, a previous authorita- 
tive examination of manuscript matter intended for the public ; 
the other is, that public discussion of all questions in the depart- 
ments of religion, of intellectual and moral philosophy, of poli- 
tics, indeed of all topics affecting the great and permanent inter- 
ests of man, is free and unrestricted. Hence the popular mind, 
the popular speech, in both countries are open to a class of in- 
fluences, which, in most Continental States, are confined to the 
privileged and the professional alone. For the same reason, the 
dialects appropriated to the elucidation of all these great subjects 
have been very widely cultivated, and their vocabularies enlarged, 
so that our language has acquired a compass and an adaptability 
to an unlimited variety of uses which nothing but free speech 
and a free press could give to it. Late journals have stated that 
dramatic pieces designed for representation on the French stage 
were to be submitted to a censorship before acting, in order that 
slang phrases and other violations of the purity of language likely 
to offend academic ears might be struck out. We may easily 
imagine that the objects of such a censorship are rather political 
than literary, but in either case it could not fail to have a preju- 
dicial influence on the character of speech, with which change 
and progress are as essentially connected as motion with the due 
performance of the organic functions of animal life. 



Lect. xx.] CHARACTEK OF PUBLIC. 377 

The effect which the muzzling of the press and the consequent 
stifling of the free and public expression of opinion on theolog- 
ical questions have exerted on speech, may be seen by comparing 
the language of our English Bible and of English writings of a 
devotional character generally, with that of similar works in the 
tongues of Central and Southern Europe. In none of these lat- 
ter does there exist a special and well-defined religious dialect. 
Technical words for theological ideas, indeed, they have, but no 
phraseology so marked in its' composition and structure as to con- 
stitute an appropriate religious diction. The same thing is true, 
to nearly the same extent, of the general political vocabulary of 
the Continent,* though, on the other hand, the comparatively 
little occasion for the employment of English in diplomacy has 
left our language more undeveloped and incomplete in that spec- 
ial department than in almost any other. 

Although the letters of Junius, and some of the writings of 
Cobbett, subjected their publishers to criminal prosecution in 
England, yet the press was nevertheless substantially free, and it 
was only by means of a free press, that productions so bold in 
their political character, and so important in their literary in- 
fluence, could have been given to the public. I speak without 
any reference to their moral or political merits or demerits ; but 
it must be allowed that Junius did much to limit, Cobbett some- 
thing to overthrow, the influence of the stilted Latinism of John- 
son and his school, and to bring back the language, if not to a 
Saxon vocabulary, at least to an idiomatic grammatical structure. 

The influence of printing on the English language has been 
modified and determined by the peculiar character and circum- 
stances of the people, by whom and for whom the literature of 
England has been created. 

The deliberate expression of human thought will always assume 
a form supposed to be adapted to the intelligence, the temper, the 
tastes, and the aims of those to whom it is addressed. He who 
speaks to an audience composed of men of one class, of one pro- 
fession, of one party, or of one sect, will use a narrower vocabu- 
lary, a more restricted, or a more select dialect, than he who ex- 

* The English word meeting, and even the derivative, mcetingai, for those 
who attend a meeting, have become common words in the political vocabulary 
of Italy. 



378 SPEEAD OF ENGLISH. [Lect. xx. 

pects to be heard by a more various and comprehensive circle ; 
and a writer who appeals to a whole people, who seeks to con- 
vince the understanding, or enlist the sympathies of a nation, 
must adopt a diction, employ arguments, and resort to illustra- 
tions, which shall, in their turn, suit the comprehension and 
awaken the interest of men of every class and every calling. 
"Whatever, therefore, is designed for the ear, or the perusal of 
what we call ' the enlightened public,' must be as miscellaneous 
in its composition as that public itself, and it can come home to 
the bosoms of all, only by using both the speech which is com- 
mon to all, and somewhat of the special vocabulary which is pe- 
culiar to each. English, in its one dialect, for its literature knows 
but one, is the vernacular, not merely of a greater number, but 
of a greater variety of persons than any tongue ever used by man. 
It is spoken from the equator to near the ultimate Kmit of human 
habitation in either hemisphere, and, starting from the British 
capital, the geographical centre of the solid surface of the globe, 
it has followed a thousand radii to the utmost circumference. 
Especially is it found established upon all great lines of traffic 
and coummunication, at all great points of agricultural or mechan- 
ical production, and wherever human life exists in its most ener- 
getic, most restless, intensest forms, there it is the organ for the 
expression of all that belongs to man's dearest interests, widest 
sympathies, highest aspirations. It is, moreover, eminently the 
language of liberty, for, of those to whom it is native, by far the 
largest portion enjoy a degree of personal, social, political, and 
religious freedom never before possessed by humanity, upon a 
great scale. From all these circumstances, there are to be found 
among those who habitually use the English tongue, and are 
familiar with written language, if not a greater diversity of char- 
acter, at least greater differences of interest and external condi- 
tion, a more generally diffused culture, and a wider range of 
thought, than have ever before been united by one medium of 
communication. The press furnishes to every English writer the 
means, and suggests to him a motive, for bringing this vast and 
diversified assemblage, the representatives of every human inter 
est, the embodiment of all human intelligence, all human passion, 
within the reach of his voice ; and in him, who, with even mod- 
erate abilities, writes from the heart and to the heart, it is no ex- 



Lect. xx.] MULTITUDE OF AUTHOES. 379 

travagant aspiration to hope, that he shall be read amid the shiv- 
ering frosts of the polar circle and the sweltering heat of the 
tropics, in lonely deserts and thickly peopled cities, upon silent 
prairies and by the shore of the lond-voiced ocean. The wings 
of British and American commerce scatter the productions of 
Anglo-Saxon genius over the habitable globe. The thunder of 
the great London journal reverberates through every clhne, and 
the opinions of the New York press are quoted in every commer- 
cial port, in every political capital. 

Thus, for the living author, English is what Latin and Greek 
are for the dead, a cosmopolite speech, whose range in comprehen- 
siveness of space corresponds to the duration of the classical 
tongues in time ; and if the voice of Athens and of Roine enjoys 
the longer echo, the words of the Anglican speaker are heard 
over the wider theatre. 

Every man, therefore, who, in furtherance of the aims of gen- 
erous scholarship, or in advocacy of any right or interest of hu- 
manity, addresses himself to the boundless audience reached 
through the medium of the Anglican press, is naturally inclined 
to use a comprehensive dialect, a wide variety of illustration, and 
clear and unequivocal forms of expression. Hence, the art of 
printing demands from its English and American patrons, not a 
multiplicity of words merely, but a style combining simplicity 
and catholicity of structure, conformity to the principles of uni- 
versal grammar, and consequently a freedom from provincialisms 
and arbitrary idioms — intelligibility, in short — to a degree not re- 
quired in the literature of any other age or race. There is an- 
other circumstance connected with the operations of the press, of 
a counteracting character so far as purity of expression is con- 
cerned, which much affects the habitual style of composition in 
our language. The general diffusion of intelligence among the 
English-speaking people has created not only a great multitude of 
readers, but, at the same time that it brings with it a wider dif- 
fusion of ability to produce, it encourages the efforts of a more 
than proportionate number of literary artisans. The rewards of 
authorship flowing through the press are now seductive beyond 
those won in any other field of human effort. A successful Eng- 
lish writer enjoys a contemporaneous fame coextensive with civ- 
ilization. His renown surpasses that of the soldier whose exploits 



380 POPULAR LITERATURE. [Lect. xx. 

lie immortalizes, his influence is greater than that of a premier, 
and he reaps a harvest of solid gains more certain and scarcely 
less abundant than that of the thriftiest merchant. The London 
Times divides among its' managers and its contributors the reve- 
nues of a principality, parliamentary majorities and ministers 
shrink before its censures, and the potent Governor-General of 
British India bows to its untitled correspondent. Prizes so rich, 
so tempting, and seemingly so easy of attainment, will be eagerly 
sought by thousands of competitors. The harvest of fame and 
profit, praise and power, depends upon the extent of the circle in 
which it is to be reaped, the number, not the character, of the 
consumers, for whose use the commodity is prepared. None seek 
the audience 'fit though few,' that contented the ambition of 
Milton, and all writers for the press now measure their glory by 
their gains. Popular literature in all its forms is consequently in 
the ascendant. The novel of society, the magazine story, the 
poetic tale of easy rhyme and easy reading, the daily sheet, and 
especially the illustrated gazette, these are the bazaars where 
genius now offers itself for sale. The aim of a numerous class of 
popular writers is to reproduce, in permanent forms, the tone of 
light and easy conversation, to make books and journals speak the 
dialect of the saloon, and hence pungency of expression, innuen- 
do, verbal wit, irony, banter, and raillery, trifling with serious 
interests, are the characteristics of what we call popular literature, 
and our language must have a vocabulary which accommodates 
itself to the taste of those whom such qualities of diction alone 
attract. In the periodical and fugitive department, scandal and 
personality are eminently acceptable, and nothing gives a pam- 
phlet or a newspaper greater currency, than the dexterity with 
which, not fashionable vices, but private character, is anatomized 
and held up to scorn or ridicule. The point of satire lies in its 
individuality. Its victims must have a local habitation and a 
name. Sly allusion, semi-equivocal expression, and pointed in- 
sinuation, too well defined to leave its personal application doubt- 
ful, therefore, form a large part of the diction of journalistic arti- 
cles relating to social life, while in political warfare, the boldest 
libels, the most undisguised grossness of abuse, alone suit the 
palate of heated partisanship. Hence, the dialect of personal 
vituperation, the rhetoric of malice in all its modifications, the 



Lect. xx.] POPTTLAK LITEEATUEE. 38-1 

art of damning with faint praise, the sneer of contemptuous 
irony, the coarse epithets of vulgar hatred — all these have been 
sedulously cultivated, and, when combined with a certain flip- 
pancy of expression and ready command of a tolerably extensive 
vocabulary, they are enough to make the fortune of any sharp, 
shallow, unprincipled journalist, who is content with the fame 
and the pelf which the unscrupulous use of such accomplishments 
can hardly fail to secure. 

The periodical press is unquestionably the channel through 
which the art of printing puts f ortli its most powerful influence 
on language, and it seems remarkable, that periodicals, which 
have existed in England since the reign of James I., should 
scarcely have produced an appreciable effect upon the English 
tongue, until they had been a hundred years in operation. The 
establishment of daily newspapers and of literary journals was 
nearly contemporaneous, and dates from an early period in the 
eighteenth century, but though the Tattler ', the Spectator, and 
the Guardian had a comparatively large circulation, and exerted 
a great influence upon the dialect of their time, yet the newspaper 
can scarcely be said to have had a place in literature until the 
success of the letters of Junius, which appeared in the Morning 
Advertiser from 1769 to 1772, gave to that class of periodicals an 
ascendency which it has ever since maintained. It may now 
fairly be said, that there is no agency through which man acts 
more powerfully upon the mind of his fellow-man, and the influ- 
ence of the art of printing upon language and thought has 
reached its acme in the daily newspaper. 

The influence of the periodical press upon the purity of lan- 
guage must be admitted to have proved hitherto, upon the whole, 
a deleterious one, and countries, where, as in England and America, 
the press is free and periodicals consequently numerous, are par- 
ticularly exposed to this source of corruption. The newspaper 
press has indeed rendered some service to language, by giving to 
it a greater flexibility of structure, from the necessity of finding 
popular and intelligible forms of expression for every class of sub- 
jects, and it has now and then preserved, for the permanent 
vocabulary of our speech, a happy and forcible popular word or 
phrase, which would otherwise have been forgotten with the 
occasion that gave it birth. * But these advantages are a very in- 
* It is interesting to notice how a felicitous expression, distinctly embody 



382 NEWSPAPEES. [Lect. xx. 

adequate compensation for the mischiefs resulting from the sloven- 
liness and inaccuracy inseparable from the necessity or hasty com- 
position upon a great variety of subjects, themselves often very 
imperfectly understood by the writer. Editors naturally seek to 
accommodate their style to the capacity and taste of the largest 
circle of readers, and in their estimate of their public, they are 
very apt to aim below the mark, and thus gradually to deprave, 
rather than elevate and refine, the taste of those whom they 
address. Hence arise the inflated diction, the straining after effect, 
the use of cant phrases, and of such expressions as not only fall in 
with, but tend to aggravate, the prevalent evil humors and pro- 
clivities of the time, the hyperbolical tone in which they com- 
mend their patrons or the candidates of their party, and, in short, 
all the vices of exaggeration of style and language. There is, how- 
ever, of late years, a great improvement in the literary character 
of the English and American newspapers. The London Times, 
whatever may be thought of its moral or political tendencies, has 
long employed writers of surpassing ability, and its example has 
done much to elevate the tone of editorial journalship in both the 
countries which employ its language. The pet phrases of hack 
journalists, the euphemism that but lately characterized the 
.A m erican newspapers, are fast giving place to less affected and 
more appropriate forms of expression. It is only the lowest class 
of Dailies that still regard - woman ' as not an honorable or re- 
spectful designation of the sex, and it is in their columns alone, 
that, in place of " well-dressed " or " handsome women," we read 
of " elegantly attired females," and of " beautiful ladies." The 
Anglican newspaper is now — what the French journal long has 
been — an intellectual organ, an authority for cultivated circles in 
politics, in letters, in aesthetics. Besides this, it is the popular 
guide and instructor for evil and for good, and it may truly be 
said to be the feature most characteristic of the lif e and literature 
of Anglo-Saxon humanity in the present age. 

ing some common prejudice or common conviction which the unlettered have 
not, till then, been able to formulate, will he seized upon by the masses, and 
will really help them to clearer thought and juster judgment on the subject 
under discussion. At the same time it must be admitted that the effect of such 
striking formularies is not always an unmixed intellectual or moral gain. They 
not unf rcquently serve, in minds of a certain character, to crystallize an error, 
so that no amount of argument, however conclusive at the moment, can ever 
really destroy it. 






LECTUEE XXI. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE AET OF PRINTING. 

m. 

On a former occasion, I spoke of the diffusion of classical litera- 
ture in modern Europe — the first great result of the invention of 
printing — as having much enlarged the English and other Euro- 
pean vocabularies, by the introduction of new words derived from 
Greek and Latin roots. But the revival of learning was not un-* 
accompanied with effects prejudicial to the cultivation of the 
modern languages, and to their employment for the higher pur- 
poses of literature. At that period, most of them were poor in 
vocabulary, rude and equivocal in syntax, unsettled in orthogra- 
phy, distracted with variety of dialect, and unmelodious in articu- 
lation. Under such circumstances, nothing could be more natural 
than that scholars imbued with the elegance, the power, the 
majesty of the ancient tongues and of the immortal works which 
adorned them, should have preferred to employ, as a vehicle for 
their own thoughts, a language which the church had everywhere 
diffused, and which was already fitted to express the highest con- 
ceptions of the human intellect, the most splendid images of the 
human fancy. He who wrote in Latin had the civilized world 
for his public ; he who used a modern tongue could only count as 
readers the people of his province, or at most of a comparatively 
narrow sovereignty. Until, therefore, by a slow and gradual pro- 
cess, the necessity of sympathy and intellectual communication 
between the learned and the ignorant, had enriched the vernacu- 
lar tongues with numerous words from the dialects of theology, 
and ethics, and law, and literature, but few scholars ventured to 
employ so humble a medium. To write in the vulgar speech was 
a humiliation, a degradation of the thought and its author, and 
literary works in the modern tongues were generally prefaced with 
an apology for appearing in so mean a dress. 

(383) 



384 USE OF LATIN. [Lect. xxi. 

The close analogy between Latin and its Eomanoe descendants 
much f acilitated the enrichment of the dialects of Southern Europe? 
but in England and the Continental Gothic nations, the stimulus 
of the Reformation was necessary to furnish an adequate motive 
and a sufficient impulse for a corresponding improvement in the 
respective languages of those peoples. 

Even so late as 1544, after so many great names had ennobled 
the speech of England, Ascham, writing on the familiar and pop- 
ular subject of Archery, says, that it "would have been both 
more profitable for his study, and also more honest for his name, 
to have written in another tongue." 

" As for the Latine or Greeke tongue," continues he, " everye 
thinge is so excellentlye done in them, that none can do better. 
In the Englishe tongue, contrary, everye thinge in a manner so 
meanlye both for the matter and handelinge, that no man can do 
worse. For therein the least learned, for the most part, have 
bene alwayes most readye to write. And they which had least 
hope in Latine, have been most bould in Englishe ; when surelye 
everye man that is most readye to talke, is not most able to 
write." * 

One of the most obvious modes in which the art of printing 
has affected language, is, that by the cheapness and consequent 
multiplication of books, and by the greater uniformity and legi- 
bility of its characters, it has made reading much easier of acqui- 
sition, and thus allowed to a larger proportion of those who use a 
given language access to its highest standards of propriety and' 
elegance. Of course, the effects of thus bringing books within 
the reach of a larger class will be measured, as between different 
countries, by the comparative extent to which literature is really 
diffused in them, and where the press is most active and least re- 
stricted, there the greatest number of the people will learn to 
comprehend and use the language of books, and there the average 
standard of correctness of speech will be relatively highest. 

The same circumstances, independently of the superior induce- 
ments to authorship of which I have already spoken, will tend to 
increase the number of aspirants for literary fame, for where all 
read, many will feel and obey the impulse to write. The abun- 

* Preface to Toxophilus. 



Lect. xxl ] KAPID COMPOSITION. 385 

dant rivalries thus created in every field of intellectual effort are 
doubtless a great incentive to the attainment of superior excel- 
lence in composition, but, on the other hand, the fear of antici- 
pation, and the haste to reap the solid rewards of successful 
authorship, concur to promote a rapidity of production which is 
inevitably associated with some negligence in point of form. I 
cannot but think that a perhaps unconscious sense (if that phrase 
does not involve a contradiction) of the necessity of rapid produc- 
tion, had some influence in prompting the advice given to young 
writers by authors so unlike as Cobbett and Mebuhr. " Never 
think of mending what you write ; let it go ; no patching," says 
Cobbett, in his strong English. "Endeavor," says Mebuhr, 
" never to strike out any thing of what you have once written 
down. Punish yourself by allowing once or twice some thing to 
pass, though you see you might give it better." And even Gib- 
bon habitually conformed to the same rule, however little trace of 
it his highly artificial style betrays.* That this method has its 
advantages as a means of enforcing caution in the use of words is 
doubtless true, and perhaps he, who, like most modern writers, 
aims only to influence the opinion of the hour, may advantageous- 
ly use the popular dialect, which will usually most readily suggest 
itself to him who writes for popular effect. But whatever may 
be the influence of the practice on the writer himself, however it 
may affect his position with his contemporaries, it cannot but have 
a prejudicial result as respects the idiom of the language, and the 
permanence of the works which are composed in it. Upon these 
points, the experience and judgment of all literature are to the 
contrary of the rule. The revamping of our own writings, in- 
deed, after an interval so long that the mental status in which we 
composed them is forgotten, and cannot be conjured up and re- 
vivified, is a dangerous experiment, but literary biography fur- 



* It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, 
to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of 
the pen till I had given the last polish to my work. — Gibbon, Memoirs, Chap. ix. 

And in chapter x., speaking of his history, he says, "My first rough manu- 
script, without any intermediate copy, has been sent to the press." 

It appears from Ticknor's Life of Prescott, that the latter carried this prac- 
tice so far as to be able to compose mentally sixty pages of his historical works, 
which he would dictate to an amanuensis at a single sitting. 
17 



386 KAPID COMPOSITION. [Lect. xxi. 

nishes the most abundant proofs, that, in all ages, the works which 
stand as types of language and composition, have been of slow 
and laborious production, and have undergone the most careful 
and repeated revision and emendation.* Especially is this true with 
regard to the oratorical dialect. Great practice, strong passion, 
and a fervid imagination may confer the gift of unstudied elo- 
quence, but the orations which after-ages read with applause are 
almost never the result of unpremeditated effort. Celebrated 
speakers prepare their impromptus beforehand to an extent in- 
credible to those who are not familiar with their habits, or, at the 
least, they make them, by subsequent revision, very different in 
diction from the volley of winged words which the excitement 
of debate may have shot forth. Demosthenes, the greatest master 
of eloquence whose works remain in a written form, never ven- 
tured to address an audience without laborious preparation, and we 
know from the younger Pliny, that the Roman advocates of his 
time carefully studied their speeches before delivery, and scru- 
pulously corrected and amplified them in writing them out after- 
wards. 

In recent times, the press has become what the Senate and the 
Forum were in the old republics, but the rapid movement of 
modern society is unfavorable to the leisurely execution, the 
finish and completeness of literary works, and, of course, to 
polish and accuracy of language. He who writes for a fickle, a 
restless, or a progressive public, must take the tide at its flow, 
and if he follows the Horatian precept, and spends nine years in 
the elaboration and recension of his book, or in pausing to allow 

* Not to speak of the endless Mmce labor of ancient classic literature, perfec- 
tion of manner has been attained by modern writers only by similar methods. 
The stylistic ability of an author must always be estimated with reference to 
the innate power of expression possessed by the language he uses. Thus tried, 
Pascal and Paul Louis Courier are by far the greatest stylists of modern times, 
and we have no English writer who can compare with either, in perfect adap- 
tation of the expression to the thought, or in flowing ease and gracefulness of 
diction. This excellence in both cases was the fruit of the most ceaseless and 
persevering labor in revision and correction. Marvellous as is the perfection 
of Goethe's style, he does not always impress you with the conviction that he 
has exhausted the utmost resources of his native tongue, and it is remarkable 
that one of his most felicitously expressed productions is a translation from 
the French — the Rameau's Nephew of Diderot — in which the fluent beauty of 
the original is admirably rendered, with little sacrifice of the German idiom. 



Lect. xxi.] COMMUNITY OF THOUGHT. 387 

himself time for cool criticism, lie will find that he comes too 
late. The world in its swift advancement has already passed far 
beyond him. 

The universality of literature, brought about through its gen- 
eral popularization by the press, has not only given birth to a 
more numerous class of producers, but has made it much more 
truly an expression or exponent of the mind and tendencies of 
the time and people, than in the ages which preceded the inven- 
tion of printing. In every country of the civilized world, there 
is a manifest drift in some particular direction, and literary effort 
of all sorts feels the impulse of the current. The perpetual, all- 
embracing inter-communication between mind and mind, through 
the press, stamps upon all the same tendencies, the same course 
of thought, the same proximate conclusions. Society is more in- 
tensely social. Men are become more deeply imbued with the 
spirit of a common humanity, and know and participate in each 
other's intellectual condition. There is a remarkable proof of 
this in the perpetually repeated instances of concurrent mental 
action between unconnected individuals. Not only does almost 
every new mechanical contrivance originate with half a dozen 
different inventors at the same moment, but the same thing is 
true of literary creation. If you conceive a striking thought, a 
beautiful image, an apposite illustration, which you know to be 
original with yourself, and delay for a twelvemonth to vindicate 
your priority of claim by putting it on record, you will find a 
dozen scattered authors simultaneously uttering the same thing. 
There are in the human mind unfathomable depths, out of which 
gush, unbidden, the well-springs of poesy and of thought ; there 
are mines, unilluminated even by the lamp of consciousness, 
where the intellect toils in silent, sleepless seclusion, and sends 
up, by invisible machinery, the ore of hidden veins, to be smelt- 
ed and refined in the fight of open day. The press, which has 
done so much to reveal man to man and thereby to promote the 
reciprocal action of each upon his fellow, has established new 
sympathies between even these mysterious abysses of our wonder- 
ful and fearful being, and thus contributed to bring about a one- 
ness of character which unmistakably manifests itself in oneness 
of thought and oneness of speech. 

The law of copyright, though we have evidence in Martial and 



388 LAW OF COPYKIGHT. [Lect. xxi. 

other writers that ancient authors were sometimes paid by book- 
sellers for their works, is a result of the art of printing, and 
could be of little value without it. It has rendered no other 
service to literature than the very doubtful one of furnishing a 
pecuniary inducement to literary effort. The privilege of copy- 
right was not originally granted as a reward and stimulus to 
authorship, but as a protection to the printer against a dangerous 
competition, for it extended as well to editions of the classics as 
to contemporaneous productions, and of course the benefit to 
authors was but incidental. In fact, it is but lately that it could 
have operated at all as a reward to English writers, for until the 
last century, the price of the copyright of original English works 
was in general hardly as much as the cost of the paper on which 
they were written. The Continental booksellers seem to have 
paid more liberally a century previous.* At this day, it may be 
doubted whether a single work of permanent value, in the litera- 
ture of any living language, owes its existence to the protection 
afforded by law. Books which are composed only because they 
will sell, are swiftly written, swiftly read, and, as they deserve, 
swiftly forgotten, while those which are destined to produce a 
deep and lasting impression, scarcely win their way to popular 
favor and an authoritative position, until the privilege of copy- 
right has expired by legal limitation. There are abuses connect- 
ed with this privilege, which are highly detrimental to the inter- 
ests of literature. The exclusive right of printing a particular 
book is, in the hands of wealthy publishers, a means of prevent- 
ing the publication of other and perhaps better books on the 
same subject, and thus that which ought to be an encouragement 
to effort, is made to operate so as to discountenance the attempts 
of rivals in the same field. The proprietor of a book, which, 
from its nature, as a dictionary or a school-book, is largely in de- 
mand, will supply booksellers with his wares only upon condition 
that they will sell no rival work. A combination between three 

* He took nothing of Printers for his copies, as he writeth, saying : " I 
have no plenty of money, and thus yet I deale with the Printers ; I receive 
nothing from them for recompense of my many copies. Sometimes I receive 
of them one copy. This I thinke is due to me, whereas other writers, yea 
translators, for every eight leaves, have an angel." — Life of Luther, Abel 
Rediviv., p. 48. 



Lect. xxi.] PEIDE OF IGISTOEANCE. 389 

or four large publishing houses, each having its own copyrights, 
may thus exclude from sale one set of books and force another 
upon the market with very little regard to the opinion of com- 
petent judges as to the merits of either. Besides this, most of 
the Eeviews, and to some extent the newspapers, are controlled 
by book-publishers, and thus criticism is forestalled, and an arti- 
ficial public opinion created, which not only gives currency to 
inferior productions, and bestows upon their authors the rewards 
which excellence alone ought to secure, but vitiates the taste of 
the age, and lowers the standard of composition, by holding up 
as models for imitation, writings which deserve only to be point- 
ed at as examples to be shunned. 

Southey, in his Colloquies, makes the remarkable statement, 
that " one of the first effects of printing was to make proud men 
look upon learning as disgraced, by being thus brought within 
reach of the common people." " When laymen in humble life," 
continues he, " were enabled to procure books, the pride of the 
aristocracy took an absurd course, insomuch that at one time it 
was deemed derogatory to a nobleman if he could read or write. 
Even scholars themselves complained that the reputation of learn- 
ing, and the respect due to it, and its rewards, were lowered when 
it was thrown open to all men. Even in this island, ignorance 
was for some generations considered to be a mark of distinction, 
by which a man of gentle birth chose, not unfrequently, to make 
it apparent that he was no more obliged to live by the toil of his 
brain, than by the sweat of his brow." 

The f eeling which Southey ascribes to the " pride of the aris- 
tocracy," was really an effect of ecclesiastical jealousy. There is 
little evidence to show that the aristocracy were more deplorably 
ignorant after the introduction of printing than before, but there 
is abundant proof that the new art was regarded with dislike by 
the church, when employed for any purpose but the multiplica- 
tion and cheapening of the Latin books required for the use of 
the clergy themselves. To the same cause we are to ascribe the 
fact, often noticed as a singular one, that Caxton printed very 
few religious books. Sir Thomas More expressly declares, that 
Caxton refrained from printing the Bible in English, because he 
feared that the penalties, ordained by Archbishop Arundel for 
copying or using Wycliffe's Bible, would be corruptly and illegal- 



390 IGNORANCE OF CLERGY. [Lect. xxi. 

ly enforced against any English translation of the sacred volume. 
For snch religious books in Latin as would have been allowed to 
be printed, there was fortunately little demand in England, and 
to the great benefit of the English language and literature, Cax- 
ton was not only left free, but obliged, to confine the operations of 
his press almost wholly to the publishing of English books. The 
English priests, themselves, were at that period as ignorant as are 
those of the Oriental churches at the present moment. We learn 
from Fuller, that early in Queen Elizabeth's reign the clergy were 
ordered to con over the lessons by themselves once or twice be- 
fore every service, in order that they might be able to read them 
fluently to the congregation. 

The art of printing, especially since its wide employment by 
the periodical press, has been a most influential agency in extir- 
pating local peculiarities of dialect, and producing the general 
uniformity with which the English language is spoken and writ- 
ten wherever it is used at all. Persons who study our American 
speech cannot fail to notice, that there is among us a tendency to 
pronounce words, and especially proper names, more in accord- 
ance with their orthography, and to make fewer exceptions to 
general rules, than in England. The most obvious, though not 
the only cause of this, is the universality of the ability to read 
and write, which modern society in free countries owes to the art 
of printing. Where all read, most persons first become acquainted 
with the names of distant localities, of eminent persons, and of 
new objects, through the press, and not by the ear. Names so 
learned will of course be pronounced according to the regular 
orthoepy of the language, and thus a general pronunciation, often 
very discordant from the local one, becomes established. In 
the case of foreign words, proper or common, we are prepared to 
find, among persons acquainted only with English, as the mass of 
those to whom that language is vernacular necessarily must be, a 
pronunciation of such names widely different from the native 
articulation. However repulsive, therefore, such distortions of 
names may be to those familiar with them in their original or- 
thoepy, we are not surprised to hear the name of the great bank- 
ers of Europe popularly pronounced Rotkch'dd, or American 
artists, of foreign extraction, spoken of respectively, as Roth- 
ermel) and Gotts-chalh. Indeed, a strict conformity to the native 



Lect. xxl] PRONUNCIATION. 391 

pronunciation of names, belonging to languages whose orthograph- 
ical system differs much from our own, is generally considered an 
offensive affectation, and a great British orator, who was as famil- 
iar with French as with English, is said to have been so scrupu- 
lous on this point, that, in his parliamentary speeches, he habitually 
spoke of an important French port as the city of Bordeaux. In Eng- 
land, the names of f amilies and of towns are often very strangely 
corrupted, not in vulgar pronunciation alone, but by the general us- 
age of the highest classes. Thus the originally French name, now 
naturalized in England and America, which is spelt (and with us 
pronounced) Beauchamp, is in England called Beecham / Belvoir 
is Beever ; Saint John, Sinjon • Cholmondeley, Chumley / Cir- 
encester, Siseter, and Alexander Gill tells us that in his time 
Daubridge-court was pronounced Dabsoot. Some of these cor- 
ruptions, at least, are old ones, for Froissart, who, as a foreigner, 
spelt English names by the ear, writing about the year 1400, uses 
Sussetour for Cirencester, and Beachame for Beauchamp. Even 
as late as 1651, I find Montgomery spelt in Abel Redivivus 
Mungumry* The original orthography of all these names is 
now recovered, and strangers, finding them in books of travel and 
newspapers, will of course pronounce them as they are spelled. 
So strong, indeed, is the tendency in this country to confirm or- 
thography and speech, that in some instances the spelling of 
English names has been altered to suit the family and neighbor- 
hood pronunciation. An example of this is found in a name 
which is written and pronounced differently, Kirkland, Cartland, 
and Catlin, by different branches of the family and in different 
localities, though Kirkland is doubtless the original form of all of 
them. A similar instance may be noted in Campbell, Kimball, 
Kemble. So the name Worcester has, in some of the families 
that bear it, been conformed to a loose pronunciation, and is spelt 
"Wooster. These changes in spelling American family names were 
made at an early day, when, though the ability to read was as 
general as now, yet books and newspapers, and of course the op- 
portunities for reading, were much fewer. At present, the tend- 

* The Saxon Chronicle, MXCY. , also has Muntgumry, and Henry of Hunt- 
ington, Mungumerie. In this word and the like the t is now felt by the speaker, 
if not heard by the auditor. "Will it not be distinctly heard by the next gener- 
ation in England, as it is even now often heard in America ? 



392 PEONUNCIATIOK. [Lect. xxi. 

ency is in the opposite direction, and many corrupted names have 
been restored both to the original spelling and orthoepy. In 
England, changes of either sort are made with somewhat greater 
difficulty, but there too, since the multiplication of railroads, and 
since names, formerly less frequently seen in a written form, are 
constantly recurring in newspapers, railway tables, and the like, 
and of course oftener used by strangers to the local orthoepy and 
by them pronounced as written, there is observed an evident 
tendency, even in the natives of towns hitherto so oddly miscalled, 
to accommodate the spoken form to the orthography, and to re- 
store the names to their ancient fulness of articulation. Thus, in 
the case of names widely disseminated by printing, the distant 
popular majority, who know the word only by its spelling, are 
carrying the day over the neighboring few who have learned it 
by the ear, and the letter is likely at last to triumph, and bring 
back the tongue to the primitive or an approximate pronuncia- 
tion. A reform of this nature, supported as it is by the con- 
stantly increasing influence of the press, cannot stop with mere 
names, and a few years will probably free spoken English from 
some of that clipping, crowding, and confusion of syllables,* 
which three centuries ago led Charles Y. to compare it to the 
whistling of birds, and which, in its modern exaggerated form, is 
a still more disagreeable peculiarity of its pronunciation. 

The same causes have produced similar effects in other coun- 
tries, and persons familiar with Continental phonology cannot 
but observe a growing inclination to give a fuller utterance to 
obscure sounds, and to articulate letters hitherto unpronouneed, 
or, if sounds have been irrecoverably lost, to omit the letters 
which once expressed them. This is most "readily noticeable in 
Erench, because the number of silent letters is greater in that 

* There were current in English, as late as the 17th century, many synco- 
pated phrases which have almost wholly disappeared since reading and writ- 
ing have become general. Two of these are mentioned in the French gram- 
mar prefixed to Cotgrave's French-English Dictionary, 1650, Section of Conso- 
nants, — muskiditti, for, much good may it doe to you ; and Godigodin, for, God 
give you good evening. So Godge, for, God give you (or ye) ; dich, for, do it you 
(or ye) ; both which, when their origin was forgotten, were followed by an- 
other pronoun or other objective, as Godge you good morrow, Much good dich 
thy good heart. Even in Italy, clear as is the usual articulation, we hear such 
expressions as cido, for the complimentary phrase, schiaw suo. 



Lect. xxi.] PEOlN'UlSrCIATIO^. 393 

than in any other European language, and a comparison of re- 
cent and older works on French pronunciation will show that 
final and radical consonants are now, according to the best usage, 
articulated in many cases where they were formerly silent. Pals- 
grave, whose French Grammar was printed in 1530, speaking of 
French pronunciation, says, "What consonantes soever they write 
in any worde for the kepynge of trewe orthographie, yet so moche 
covyt they in redyng or spekyng to have all theyr vowelles and 
dipthongues clerly herde, that betwene two vowelles, whether 
they chaunce in one worde alone, or as one worde fortuneth to 
f olowe after another, they never sounde but one consonant at 
ones, in so moche that, if two different consonantes, that is to say, 
not beyng both of one sorte, come together betweene two vow- 
elles, they leve the fyrst of them unsounded." He then gives a 
list of one hundred and nine words, where s preceding another 
consonant is pronounced, as exceptions to the general rule. It 
appears from Beza that there were some other exceptions, but 
he also recognizes the rule. Printing, and the consequent diffu- 
sion of a grammatical knowledge of the language, have had the 
effect, first, of expelling from the orthography a portion of these 
silent consonants, and secondly, of changing the pronunciation 
and bringing it more into accordance with the spelling, by intro- 
ducing the articulation of consonants formerly ' unsounded.' 
This double process is still going on, and we may venture to 
predict, that the spelling and the orthoepy of French will be 
much less irreconcilable a century hence than they are at present.* 

* Palsgrave gives the figured pronunciation of a few sentences and single 
words by way of illustrating his rules. In these examples the following 
words occur : 

dicton, figured pronunciation, diton. 

ajuger. 
moutitude. 
sustance. 
scouture. 
morte. 
detiner. 
leke. 
elesion. 
celete. 

Palsgrave, 23, 60, 62. 
In 1701, croire was pronounced crere. See Littre in v. croire. 
According to the same authority, Hist. XI. Siecle, Vol. 2, p. 907, rawas 
17* 



dicton, 


figured pronun 


adjuger, 


tt it 


multitude, 


tt tt 


su&stance, 


tt tt 


scou^pture 


(sculpture), " 


morte?, 


" " 


destiner, 


< t tt 


leque£, 


tt tt 


election, 


tt tt 


celeste, 


tt a 



394 PEEMAJ^ENCE OF WOBDS. [Lect. xxi. 

I have shown, in a former lecture, that the mechanical difficul- 
ties of the art of printing at first tended to increase the existing 
confusion and uncertainty of English orthography; but after 
these difficulties were overcome, as they seem to have been soon 
after the publication of the first editions of King James's Bible, 
the influence of printing was in the contrary direction, and our 
spelling has within two hundred years undergone far fewer and 
less important changes than our vocabulary. In both these par- 
ticulars, the art is now eminently conservative ; in the former, 
merely sustaining that which has once become established, but in 
the latter both preserving the old and freely admitting the new. 
With so large a number of public libraries usually well secured 
against destruction by negligence or violence, scarcely any book 
can become absolutely extinct ; and every word, once introduced 
into our printed literature, may fairly be said to have become im- 
perishable. We find in old authors many words now disused, 
and others which are wholly unintelligible. These, in some in- 
stances, turn out to be typograhical errors, but the industry of 
etymologists is continually discovering the meaning of old words 
not hitherto understood, and reviving obsolete or obsolescent ex- 
pressions, which the revolutions of time and circumstance have 
again made needful or convenient. Thus the boast of printing, 
that it is the art which is the general conservator of all arts, 



both spelled and pronounced rei, and the orthography was altered before the 
change in pronunciation took place. 

Genin, a very high authority in French philology, observes : 

" Aujourd'hui il n'est pas un petit commis de magasin qui ne se pique de 
f aire sonner les liaisons quand il raisonne sur Far t-antique, ou se plaint d'avoir 
froi t-aux pieds, ou s'accuse avec fatuite de ses tor z-enver z-elle." 

The tendency to pronounce the final consonants (which is but a single case 
of the rehabilitation of disfranchised letters in French phonology) is ascribed 
by Genin to the influence of the theatre, where the articulation of consonants 
in liaisons, partly for metrical reasons and partly for the sake of distinctness, 
has always been practised in versified dramas. Genin Rec. Phil. II. 425, 427. 

Doubtless in Paris, and in France at large, the influence of the theatre on 
such questions is very great ; but, as the corresponding change in English 
articulation is clearly traceable, not to theatrical practice, but to the diffusion 
of letters, I cannot but suppose that like effects in France may be, in great 
part at least, ascribed to the same cause. 

On the subject of changes in French pronunciation, see also Pelissier, 
Langue Franpaise, pp. 161, 266-7. 



Lect. xxi.] DICTI01STAEIES. 395 

proves eminently true with respect to speech, which may be con- 
sidered as an art, in so far as it is an acquired, not a purely spon- 
taneous, self -developing faculty. 

Printing has conferred an important benefit on language, by 
multiplying, and putting within the reach of every man, books of a 
class which, when literature existed only in a written form, were 
rarer than those of almost any other character. I refer to dic- 
tionaries, and other works of the comprehensive and encyclopaedic 
class, which, although they cannot be said to owe their existence 
to printing, yet could never have obtained a general circulation 
without it. We know that ancient literature possessed works of 
this kind, but they were so little multiplied, that scarcely any of 
them have come down to us ; nor did lexicography make a prog- 
ress correspondent with that of other departments of knowledge, 
until after the art of printing had been long employed in the dif- 
fusion of general literature. 

The multiplication and improvement of dictionaries are matters 
especially important to the general comprehension of English, 
both because of its great copiousness, and more particularly on 
account of the multifarious character of its sources, and its little 
facility of derivation and composition. Languages which, like 
Greek and German, are derived by simple and easily understood 
rules from a comparatively small number of roots, contain few 
words not intelligible to those acquainted with their f arailiar and 
constantly recurring rudiments. For instance, the common Ger- 
man-English dictionaries contain about two hundred words com- 
pounded of h a 1 b , the equivalent of our English half, and some 
other equally familiar root, the meaning of every one of which 
compounds is immediately obvious to every German. In Web- 
ster, I find fewer than fifty compounds into which our half enters, 
its place being taken in other words by the Greek h e m i , the 
Latin semi, the French d e m i , and the Italian mezzo, all 
of which are unmeaning to the Englishman, and their explana- 
tions must be sought in dictionaries. Although, therefore, from 
the former low state of philological learning in England and 
America, our lexicography is far behind that of most Continental 
nations, yet no modern language so essentially requires the aid of 
dictionaries as the English. 

Printing has also introduced a multitude of other facilities for 



396 INDEXES. [Lect. xxi. 

the convenient use of books, such, for example, as indexes. Two 
copies of the same manuscript, especially if written by different 
persons, would never correspond, line for line, or even page for 
page, and, of course, an index prepared for one copy would not 
answer as a guide to a given passage in another. To prepare a 
separate index for each manuscript would be a work of hardly less 
labor and cost than to rewrite the whole copy, and the consequence 
was that indexes scarcely existed at all, and learned men were 
obliged to rely upon their memories alone, when they wished to 
refer to a particular passage in the works of an author.* Accord- 
ingly, the ancients introduced quotations, with no other indication 
of their source than the name of the author, or at most the book, 
from which they were taken. But the very want of these facili- 
ties had its advantages, for writers would be more likely to accus- 
tom themselves to a natural and logical arrangement of the divi- 
sions and subdivisions of their subject, when they knew that a 
reader could have no mere mechanical means of obtaining a gen- 
eral view of it. Books were anciently written to be read, studied^ 

* Pliny's Natural History is one of the few ancient books which have come 
down to us with even a Table of Contents. The author concludes his Dedica- 
tion to Vespasian with this reference to his Table, as translated by Holland, 
London, 1601 : " Now to conclude and knit up mine epistle : knowing as I doe, 
that for the good of the commonweale, you should be spared and not em- 
peached by any privat businesse of your owne, and namely in perusing these 
long volumes of mine ; to prevent this trouble, therefore, I have adioyned im- 
mediately to this epistle and prefixed before these books, the summarie or con- 
tents of everie one : and verie carefully have I endeavoured that you should 
not need to read them throughout, whereby all others also, after your example, 
may ease themselves of the like labour ; and as any man is desirous to know 
this or that, he may seeke and readily find in what place to meet with the same. 
This learned I of Valerius Sorranus, one of our owne Latin writers, who hath 
done the like before me and set an Index to those Books which he entituled 
eTTOTtriSiov. " 

The Table begins with a statement of the general subject oi^ach book ; and 
as a ready method of finding the books, the initial words of each are given, 
nothing being referred to by number of page. Then follows a specific list of 
the subjects discussed in the several books, an estimate of the number of par- 
ticular facts recorded, and the names of the authors cited as authorities. 

Of course, verbal indexes and concordances, which modern critical scholars 
(with the exception of the Germans who at least compel their readers to do 
without them for the most part) find so useful, must have been much rarer 
than Tables of Contents, and even these, it is evident from the remarks of 
Pliny, were little known in his time. 



Lect. xxi.] LEGIBILITY OF PKINT. 397 

to be, as Thucydides has it, " a possession forever," not to amuse 
an idle hour, or at best to be consulted upon special occasion, as 
one looks out a word in a dictionary. 

There are other facilities of research and of criticism connected 
with the legibility of letterpress, which are of no trifling advan- 
tage to the scholar. Suppose he wishes to And, in a particular au- 
thor, a passage to which he has not an exact reference, or that he 
is seeking exemplifications of the use of a given word or phrase, 
in order to determine its meaning or syntactical character by the 
authority of good writers ; the eye, which takes in a page at a 
glance, will run through a printed volume, and discover the pas- 
sage or the word sought for, in the time which would be required 
to decipher half a dozen columns of manuscript. Again, let an 
author who has carefully elaborated his composition and given it 
the finishing touches, revise it in letterpress, and how will the 
errors, the repetitions, the negligences, which a dozen perusals in 
manuscript had failed to detect, stare him in the face as monstrous 
and palpable delinquencies ! So, the compression of matter, which 
printing allows, is a thing of very great convenience. True it is, 
that in the days of ancient calligraphy, minute writing was brought 
to such perfection that, as is easily shown by calculation, Cicero's 
story of the Iliad, which could be carried in a nutshell, is not in 
the slightest degree improbable ; and I have myself seen the en- 
tire Arabic Koran in a parchment roll four inches wide and half 
an inch in diameter.* But these are exceptional cases. Printed 

* Cicero hath recorded, that the whole Poeme of Homer called Ilias, was 
written in a peace of parchmin, which was able to be couched within a nut- 
shell.— Holland's Pliny, i. 167. 

Lalanne, Curiosites Bibliographiques, describes an edition of Rochef oucault's 
Maxims, published by Didot in 1829, as printed typographically in pages meas- 
uring 951 square millimetres, and containing 26 lines, with 44 letters to the 
line. A page one inch and twenty-one hundredths square, would be about 
equal to 951 square millimetres, or one square inch and forty-six hundredths, 
which would give 783 letters to the inch. This falls far short of what has been 
accomplished by the pen, and very greatly below the performances of the 
graver. Mr. Charles Toppan, an eminent engraver of New York, has engraved 
the Lord's Prayer with its title, the Ten Commandments with title and num- 
bers, and his own initials, within a circle of less than 41-hundredths of an inch 
in diameter. The number of letters and figures on this plate is 1,550, and as its 
area is a trifle over an eighth of a square inch, the number of letters to the 
square inch would be 12,000. According to Lalanne, the Iliad contains 501 ,930 



398 MULTIPLICATION OF BOOKS. [Lect. xxr. 

letter is, generally, much smaller than manuscript, and as manu- 
scripts in the volume, or roll-form, were usually written on one 
side only, the bulk of a printed book is very much less than that 
of the same matter written by the hand. Hence we have, within 
the compass of a hand- volume, a dictionary or other book of refer- 
ence, which, in an ancient library, would have filled a compart- 
ment ; and the convenience of consulting it is increased in much 
the same proportion as its compression. 

On the other hand, the facilities of production have multiplied 
the mass of books out of all proportion to the needs of literature. 
The cost of a book lies mainly in what printers call composition, 
that is, the arrangement of the type and pages to receive the im- 
pression. The amount of this item is the same for one copy as 
for a hundred thousand, and the typographical composition of 
a volume is scarcely more expensive than the execution of a single 
copy carefully written by hand. Every successive repetition of a 
manuscript costs as much as the first, and each, of course, as much 
as the type-setting for a whole edition of a printed book. Hence, 
an ancient author, who desired a wide and permanent circulation 
for his book, would study to confine it within such limits of bulk 
and price, that it could be repeated and multiplied without an 
extravagant tax on the purses of his public. But when the cost 
of books was so reduced by printing that the price of one ancient 
volume would buy a library, and a publisher could circulate a 

letters, and of course, if engraved with equal minuteness, the whole Iliad would 
be contained within the compass of less than forty-two square inches, or, in 
other words, on a slip of paper one inch wide and twenty-one inches long, 
printed on both sides. 

The title of Mr. Toppan's engraving can be made out, and, in a very strong 
light, much more of it read, without a magnifier, at least by the microscopic 
vision of a near-sighted person, but the height of the letters does not exceed the 
150th part of an inch, and it cannot be said to be legible to the naked eye. 
Lalanne says, that Huet proved by experiment, that a thin parchment, measur- 
ing 27 by 21-& centimetres, which would give an area of 89 square inches, writ- 
ten on both sides, would contain the Iliad, and such a parchment, he observes, 
would readily go into a common-sized nut. Mr. Toppan might double the 
height and width of his letters and spaces, and still print the whole Iliad on one 
side of such a leaf. 

Among the impudent forgeries of the notorious Simonides, there were manu- 
scripts of wonderful beauty of execution, and written in characters almost as 
minute as those of Mr. Toppan's engraving. 



Lect. xxi.] EXTENT OF LIBEAEIES. 399 

hundred copies for a less sum than was formerly expended in pro- 
ducing one, the necessity of conciseness and compression was no 
longer felt. While, therefore, the immortal history of Thucydides, 
which, after three and twenty centuries, numbers hardly fewer 
readers than in the days of its greatest domestic glory, may be 
contained in two pocket volumes, Thuanus in the sixteenth cen- 
tury extends his narrative of the events of a few years, on a narrow 
theatre, to seven folios, the weight of which has already crushed 
the fabric of their author's fame. So numerous have books be- 
come, by modern facilities of production and reproduction, that 
men of varied tastes and multifarious reading can find time to 
peruse nothing. They skim over books, or as the French ex- 
pressively say, they parcourent les livres, run through 
them, study them by tables of contents and indexes. "What, 
read books ! " said one of the great lights of European physiologi- 
cal science to a not less eminent American scholar, " I never read 
a book in my life, except the Bible." He had time only to glance 
over the thousands of volumes which lay around him, to consult 
them occasionally, to excerpt the particular facts or illustrations 
which he needed to aid him in his own researches. 

The elder Pliny, the most indefatigable laborer, the most vo- 
racious literary glutton of ancient times, in that remarkable dedi- 
cation of his Natural History which I have just cited, says, that 
he had collected his encyclopedia out of two thousand volumes, 
written by one hundred approved authors, all of which he had 
diligently read.* Now, to judge from the Herculanensian manu- 
scripts, these two thousand rolls would hardly have made two 
hundred fair octavos, and this was probably the entire library of 
the most learned of the Romans. In modern times, scholars by 
no means millionaires, as Thott in Denmark and Murr in Ger- 
many, have collected libraries of more than one hundred thousand 
volumes, each of which was equivalent to many of Pliny's, though 
we may well doubt whether the relative value was proportioned 
to the bulk.f 

* "In 36 Books I have comprised 20,000 things, all worthie of regard and 
consideration, which I have collected out of 2000 volumes or thereabout, that 
I have diligently read, (and yet verie few of them there be, that men learned 
otherwise, and studious, dare meddle withall, for the deepe matter and hidden 
secrets therein contained,) and those written by 100 several elect and approved 
authors." Holland's Pliny. Dedication. 

t The largest libraries which royal munificence founded in ancient times, 



400 STEEEOTYPE. [Lect. xxi. 

The art of stereotyping has greatly increased the ease of multi- 
plication, and, in books much in demand, lessened the cost of pro- 
duction, and of course augmented the pecuniary profits of the 
publisher and the author, though without a corresponding reduc- 
tion of price to the consumer, and with some detriment to the 
interests of literature. True it is, that a writer who designs to 
stereotype his work, has strong inducements to carry it to the 
highest pitch of completeness and finish, and if it belongs to any 
department of progressive knowledge, to bring it down to the 
latest moment in the history of his subject. But a book once 
stereotyped is substantially immutable. To every suggestion of 
improvement, to every exposure of error, every announcement of 
advancement by other inquirers in the same field, and even to 
new thoughts growing out of his own researches or riper reflec- 
tions, the author must reply, with Pilate, " What I have written, 
I have written 1 " and the criticisms of friends and foes alike are 
but arguments after judgment. The possession of a set of stereo- 
type plates enables a capitalist to defy competition. What printer 
will bring out a new edition of a book which he can afford at a 
dollar a volume, when he knows that his next-door neighbor, by 
means of his stereotype plates, can produce the same book in a 
form, which, in the uncritical judgment of the public, is little in- 
ferior, at half the price ? Hence the art of stereotyping is one of 
the means which strengthen the tyrannical monopoly of litera- 
ture to which I have before alluded ; and though it may serve 
to diffuse knowledge' more widely, it tends to retard its real 
progress.* 

admitting that the number of volumes has not been exaggerated, were, doubt- 
less, much inferior in quantity of matter to very many existing collections of 
printed books. The most extensive library before the invention of printing, 
of which we have credible accounts, was that of Tripoli in Syria, composed 
chiefly of Arabic books, and destroyed by the crusaders. Christian zealots 
have declaimed much against the barbarism of Omar, who is accused of the 
wanton destruction of the Alexandrian library, but how many of them have 
stigmatized the equally blind and culpable fanaticism which led the champions 
of the cross to burn the far larger collection at Tripoli, Cardinal Cisneros to 
destroy eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts, and even Flechier to applaud 
Cardinal Ximenes for having made an auto-da-fe of five thousand Korans ? 

See Yiardot, Histoire des Arabes et des Mores d'Espagne, vol. i. chap. 1, and 
vol. ii. chap. ii. Also, Revue Orientale, II., 495. 

* In England and the United States, where every book for which a large 



Lect. xxi.] rNTLUEITCES OF PKINTEN"G. 401 

To strike tlie exact balance between the various influences of 
the art of printing, with its mechanical conditions, for good and 
for evil, is to earthly faculties impossible ; but there can be no 
doubt that to the improvement of language, as a means of inter- 
communication between all the ranks of humanity, and therefore to 
the general elevation of humanity itself in the scale of being, it is 
the most important, the most beneficent of the inventions of man. 

circulation is expected is stereotyped, the last edition differs from the first only 
in the title-page, which is renewed every year as regularly as the Almanac, 
and which heralds it as the 30th or the 3,000th edition according to the elasticity 
of the conscience of the publisher. In Germany, where stereotyping is 
little practised, the small editions usually printed rapidly succeed each other, 
and almost always with considerable changes. A German scholar, in his first 
edition, generally examines and refutes all that has been advanced by other 
writers of all times and countries upon the same subject, and those who buy 
the first edition are fortunate if they do not soon find that the author has made 
that worthless, by refuting himself in the second. There is never an end to 
the "Last Words" and "More Last Words" of a German Baxter, so long as 
he lives, and you are safe in quoting his authority only from Ostern to 
Michaelis, and from Michaelis to Ostern, because every new M e s s e brings 
with it either a recantation of his former views, or an advance upon them. 

To speak seriously, the intellectual independence and moral courage of 
Germany, and those habits of persevering and continued research which forbid 
the scholars of that country to settle down upon the results of even their own 
investigations as final stereotyped conclusions, have been of infinite service in 
promoting the increase of knowledge and extending the sphere of human 
thought. 

I would gladly have added some speculations on the influence of the Tele- 
graph, and its inexorable "ten words," on language, but I have already per- 
haps devoted too much space to the consideration of the mechanical conditions 
which operate on human speech. 

I must, however, be allowed to advert to one fact connected with the history 
of printing, which I have never seen explained, or, so far as I remember, even 
alluded to. It is, that in the seventeenth century (I have noticed no case in 
the sixteenth) successive editions of the same work, though differing widely in 
size and in general aspect of letter, are often printed, page for page, line for 
line, and word for word, in strict conformity with the prototype. Thus the 
first four editions of Sandys' Travels in the East, are identical in arrangement 
of the matter of the text. The two editions of Bernal Diaz, Madrid, 1632, 
though printed with very different types, otherwise exactly correspond to each 
other, except that one of them, presumably the later, contains an additional 
chapter on the portentous rains of reptiles — such as toads and the like — as well 
as other prodigies, which preceded the advent of the terrible Cortez. Was this 
conformity for convenience of reference ? Or was it because experience had 
shown that the printers' journeymen could be trained to follow copy exactly, 
but could not be trusted to diverge at all from the printed page ? 



LECTUKE XXII. 

ORTHOEPICAL CHANGES IN ENGLISH. 

Few subjects, belonging to the study of languages, are more 
difficult of investigation than the successive changes in their pro- 
nunciation. They are difficult, because the memory of a man or 
a generation, which almost alone preserves the record of such 
changes, is not long enough to admit of mutations greater than 
the transposition of an accent, the lengthening or shortening of 
a vowel, and the like, and our vocal notation is so incomplete 
and irregular, that we are always doubtful what sound is repre- 
sented by any given combination of letters, unless in the case of 
known words which habit has rendered familiar to the ear. The 
obsolete words which occur in Chaucer and in Spenser are al- 
most as uncertain in their sounds as if they belonged to an un- 
known tongue. We are, therefore, much in the dark as to the 
fact of a change in any given case, and it is seldom that we can 
say positively how any one word was pronounced a century ago, 
But in the few cases where the change is established, we are gen- 
erally wholly unable to account for it. True, there are observed 
in all nations, all languages, tendencies to this or that revolution 
in pronunciation ; but whence these tendencies, what are their 
laws, and what connection have they with changes in the sig- 
nification of words, or their combination in periods \ * In the 

* The following remarks will illustrate what I mean by the connection 
between orthoepical and syntactical changes. In all languages, and especially 
in those where there is a marked tendency to the coalescence of successive 
articulations, as in Greek and in English, the pronunciation of consonants is 
much affected by the character of the sounds which precede or which follow 
them. In modern Greek, k preceded by y or by v, takes the sound of our g 
hard, and av kokto is pronounced ang-goptoli ; if tt is preceded by v, the v 
assumes the sound of /u, and the tt of the English b ; consequently avv ttovg) is 
pronounced scem-boh-noh ; r following v generally sounds d, and hrav&a is artic- 
ulated en-ddf-tJiah ; tt preceded by ^ is sounded as the European b. The con- 
(402) 



Lect. xxn.] ENGLISH AND THE GOTHIC LANGUAGES. 403 

case of a people like that of early England, or of the modern 
United States, made up of a hundred elements, exposed to a 
thousand external influences, we may see obvious causes of fluc- 
tuation in pronunciation ; but in sedentary, homogeneous races, 
secured by position from foreign contact, it is often impossible 

sonantal sounds b and d "begin no Greek word, and in writing foreign names, 
and borrowed words in which those sounds occur, the Greeks use for b the 
combination ,u- ; for d, the combination vr, so that Byron is spelled M.7rdlpo)v ; 
Bob would be Mito/utt ; dead, vtevt and double, vTbfnu'X. It is conceivable that 
foreign influence or other causes may so modify the inflections and syntax, 
that those finals and initials, which never occur in succession in one stage of 
a language, may very frequently be brought together in another, and, by their 
reciprocal influence, much modify the general articulation of the speech. 

Other interesting illustrations of the influence of articulations on each other 
will be found in the learned and curious History of the Greek alphabet by 
Professor Sophocles, second edition, Cambridge, 1854. 

On page 277, and in a note on page 278, I mentioned instances where the 
grammatical use of words had been changed for orthoepical reasons. Another 
example, where the form of a word has been affected by the confusion of 
sounds, is in the phrase ' God Hid you,' which occurs in As You Like It, III. 
3, and V. 4. In Sylvester's Dubartas, edition of 1611, IIII Book, IIII Day 
of the II week, we have the form ' God dild you.' Speaking of the lover, 
who discovers that his mistress owes her fine complexion to art, he says : 

His cake is dough ; God dild you, he will none ; 
He leaves his suit, and thus he saith anon, &c. 

Gabriel Harvey, in a letter to Spenser, Hazlewood, II. 300, writes the phrase, 
' Goddilge yee.' " Youre Latine Farewell is a goodly braue yonkerly peece of 
work, and Goddilge yee, I am always maruellously beholding vnto you, for 
your bountifull titles." These three forms are evidently one word. Where 
a consonant is repeated, we generally articulate it but once, and therefore 
' God 'ild ' and ' God dild' are hardly distinguishable by the ear. Dilge, again, 
is explained by the coalescence of the consonant d with the consonantal y of 
the following pronoun. The English g soft or,; is generally considered as a 
compound consonant consisting of d and sh, but it may, with greater accu- 
racy, be resolved into d and y consonant. If to the word year we prefix a d, 
we obtain jeer, and, d-\-yeer more truly represents this sound than d-\-shear, 
which is, very nearly, d-\-s-\-year. Hence, God dilge ye is, in sound, almost 
exactly equivalent to God Hid ye. Although English articulation has long 
tended to insert the y consonant where it does not belong, rather than to sup- 
press it where it does, yet the examples collected in Nares under God 'ild, as 
well as the concurrent use of God yield in similar combinations, show almost 
conclusively that the latter is the original, the former a corrupted form. The 
etymology God sliield is quite improbable. 

Halliwell, Glossary, gives dilde, to protect, as Anglo-Norman, but he cites 



404 ENGLISH AND THE GOTHIC LANGUAGES. [Lect. xxn. 

to suggest any explanation of orthoepic mutations. The people 
of Iceland have been less exposed to external influences than any 
other civilized and cultivated nation of Europe ; yet, while their 
grammar and their vocabulary have remained essentially un- 
altered, their pronunciation appears to have undergone consider- 
able changes. In Norway, a country also eminently exempt 
from the action of extraneous forces, and which, seven centuries 
since, used the same language as that of Iceland, there has been 
a great revolution in the pronunciation of those words which 
remain the same in the dialects of both; and this observation 
applies with no less force to Sweden, which is almost equally 
secluded from foreign influences. I speak now wholly with 
reference to the pronunciation of words which have remained in 
use, in forms substantially the same, not of lexical or grammati- 
cal changes.* 

Many of our English words vary much in pronunciation from 
their cognates in the other Gothic dialects, and while, on the one 
hand, it is difficult to suppose that their present articulation can 
be as widely distinct from their own primitive utterance as it is 
from that of the same words in living Continental languages, it 
is, on the other, scarcely less so to imagine that the orthoepy of 
Anglo-Saxon differed from that of its Continental sisters as much 
as English pronunciation now does.f 

no authority, and I find no evidence of the existence of such an Anglo- 
Norman word. 

In Swedish orthography,/ corresponds to the English y consonant, and con- 
sequently dj in that language represents the English j. The confusion between 
sounds of this class is well illustrated by the following line from Browning : 

" That hutch s/iould rustle with sufficient straw." 

* Rask says that in ancient Icelandic, /, when not initial, had in all cases the 
sound of v, so that n a f n , name, was pronounced navn. In modern Ice- 
landic, the same word is pronounced nabbn ; the verb n e f n a , (infinitive,) 
nebna, but the past tense, nef ndi, as if written nemndi, and the participle 
nef nt like nemnt. In the same words as used in the modern Scandinavian, 
the Danish has an orthography which doubtless once represented the original 
pronunciation though now differently articulated. Nafn is in Danish writ- 
ten Navn, but the a v is pronounced like the German a u or nearly our ou, 
so that Navn and noun are much the same in sound. But in Sweden, the 
spelling and pronunciation correspond to the modern Icelandic articulation of 
the past tense and participle. Nafn is, in Swedish, namn; nefna, 
namna. 

f This discrepancy between the English (and probably Anglo-Saxon) and 



Lect. xxii.] ENGLISH ORTHOEPY. 405 

The pronunciation of Anglo-Saxon is a matter of very great 
uncertainty. The opinions of grammarians on this subject, how- 
ever positively expressed, are little better than conjectures, and 
the explanation of the changes which are known to have oc- 
curred, is very obscure. With respect to the fluctuations in 
modern English, the difficulty is hardly less, and it is increased 
by the notorious fact, that the differences of local pronunciation 
were, until within a very recent period, much greater than at 
present, so that when we have ascertained that a particular 
author pronounced in a particular way, we are not always au- 
thorized to infer that he followed any generally recognized 
standard. 

The sources of information on the history of our pronuncia- 
tion are, old treatises, expressly on English grammar and orthoepy, 
or on foreign languages in which comparisons are given between 
English and foreign sounds ; casual remarks of authors not writ- 
ing professedly on this subject ; and, lastly and chiefly, poetical 
compositions. This last standard of comparison is not a sure 
guide, except in regard to accentuation, where, as the metre de- 
termines the quantity of each word, the only source of uncer- 

tlie Teutonic pronunciation of words identical in etymology and spelling, 
appears to me to add some weight to the opinions I have expressed concern- 
ing the essentially composite character of the Anglo-Saxon language, and its 
distinctness from the comparatively homogeneous dialects of the Teutonic 
stock. All these latter agree in rejecting the two sounds of the ill (h and $) 
which we have inherited from the Anglo-Saxon ; they pronounce, approxi- 
mately, i like our e, and e like our a ; they have the softened 6 and u and the 
guttural and palatal ch and g, which are wanting in English ; and they have not 
the English ch and J, or the Anglo-Saxon and English combination hw (wh). 
Our articulation, though very far from coinciding with that of the Scandina- 
vian languages, nevertheless, on the whole, agrees with it more nearly than 
with that of the German. The vulgar New England pronunciation of the 
diphthong on or ow, generally represented in writing it as provincial, by eow, 
prevails in several English local districts, as well as in some, at least, of the 
Frisian patois, and very possibly was once a normal sound in English, as it 
now is in Danish, where it is written sev, or ev, as in Revle, revne, 
r e v s e , in which words it corresponds to the ou or ow in cow, round, house, 
in the Eastern pronunciation. 

Almost every sound which is characteristic of English orthoepy is met with 
in one or other of the Scandinavian languages, and almost all their peculiari- 
ties, except those of intonation, are found in English, while between our 
articulation and that of the German dialects most nearly related to Anglo- 
Saxon, there are many irreconcilable discrepancies. 



406 ACCENTUATION. [Lect. xxh. 

tainty is the doubt whether the author may not have displaced 
the accent by poetic license. In reference to rhymes, there is, 
first, the great difficulty of determining the sound of either of the 
words in the pair, whereby to test the pronunciation of the other, 
and then, the possibility that the rhymes, in a particular case, 
were of that imperfect class which necessity renders allowable. 
The word heaven, for instance, has few perfect rhymes in Eng- 
lish, and of these few, most are, like leaven, seven, eleven, words 
not likely to be used in the same couplet with heaven* The 
consequence is, that it is more frequently made to rhyme with 
given, driven, riven, striven, than with words exactly coincident 
with it in sound. A foreigner, knowing as little of the orthoepy 
of modern English as we do of that of the sixteenth century, 
would probably infer from a comparison of the examples where 
heaven is used in English poetry, that the combination ea was, in 
English orthography, equivalent to short i. Natives are of course 
liable to the same error in arguing former identity of sound from 
former use in rhyme. 

In the Gothic and Romance languages, with the remarkable 
exception of the French, the accentual system is perhaps the most 
marked characteristic of their articulation. It is that which the 
foreigner first becomes aware of, because, in the main, the ac- 
cented syllable is the one most distinctly heard in listening to a 
strange language. Our means of knowing the ancient accentua- 
tion of English are, so far as they go, capable of a good deal of 
certainty, and the law of change on this subject is evidently that 
of throwing the stress of voice more and more back towards the 
initial syllables, in accordance with the general rule in the cog- 
nate tongues, so that English accentuation is becoming more and 
more Anglicized, so to speak, while the vocabulary is becoming 
Romanized. There are certain exceptions to this rule in this 
country, but I postpone the consideration of them until I ex- 
amine the tendencies of the language in America as contrasted 
with those it manifests in England. 

* A friend furnishes me with the following quotation, which shows that these 
rhymes may be used even in serious composition : 

" As in the Measures of the Meal, the Leaven, 
So in the heart, that preparation Sweet for Heaven, 
The Hallow'd Rest of one day in the Seven." 



Lect. xxil] OETHOGEAPHY OF ENGLISH. 407 

The pronunciation of primitive English is a subject of much 
interest in many points of view, but most obviously with ref- 
erence to the character of early versification, and especially to the 
question whether old English poems, as those of Chaucer and 
Grower, are strictly metrical, or merely, like the verses of Lang- 
land in Piers Ploughman, rhythmical. It is also linguistically 
important, because we cannot compare our etymology and our 
inflections with those of languages nearly or remotely related, 
without knowing whether given sounds are expressed by the 
same signs in both. This uncertainty is a constant source of 
error in etymological research, and especially in the attempts to 
deduce native words from Oriental and other remote roots as 
written in European characters; for the imperfection of our 
alphabet often obliges travellers and scholars, in recording 
foreign words, to use one letter to express two sounds very dif- 
ferent to a trained ear, but for which our notation furnishes but 
a single sign. 

The collision between the Anglo-Saxon and the Eorman-French 
orthographical and orthoepical systems, and the necessity of effect- 
ing a compromise between them, naturally drew the attention of 
English scholars, at a very early period, to the relation between 
sounds and the signs which represent them. The extract from 
the Ormulum given at the conclusion of Lecture XIX., shows 
that the writer had very carefully considered the subject ; and 
many of the manuscript copies of Gower and Chaucer exhibit, in 
the unif ormity and consistency of their orthography, like evidence 
that it had received thoughtful and thorough investigation. Sev- 
eral attempts were made in the sixteenth century to reform the 
spelling of English, which had been much corrupted by causes 
already described in previous lectures. Among these attempts, 
the system employed by Churchyarde in some of his poetical 
works, and ridiculed by Sou they, under the name of " Church- 
yarde's Uglyography," is certainly not very inviting to the eye, 
but it is by no means without merit. The orthography proposed 
by Alexander Gill, or, as he writes it, Gil, in his Logonomia An- 
glica, first published in 1619, is still better adapted to the expres- 
sion of the sounds of the language, and has the further advantage 
of suggesting the etymology of all native words more clearly than 
most other efforts in the way of phonographic writing. It should 



408 THE ENGLISH A. [Lect. xxii. 

be added, that the general conclusion to be drawn from the Logo- 
nomia is, that the change which has taken place in English pro- 
nunciation within two centuries and a half is, with one or two 
marked exceptions, less than we should infer from our other 
sources of information on the subject. 

All the old English writers on orthography and pronunciation 
fail alike, in the want of clear descriptive analysis of sounds, and 
of illustration by comparison with the orthoepy of other lan- 
guages more stable and uniform in articulation. For this reason, 
and probably also on account of real dialectic differences of pro- 
nunciation between them,* they appear often to stand in very 
direct contradiction to each other, and it is quite impossible to 
reconcile or explain their discrepancies. Under these circum- 
stances no very precise and certain results can be arrived at, and 
I do not propound the opinions I am about to express, as gener- 
ally supported by any thing more than a balance of probabilities. 

Whether the vowel a had in Anglo-Saxon the same general sound 
as in English, or if not, when the change in its force took place, 
cannot now be positively ascertained. The most important direct 
authority I am aware of with respect to the early pronunciation 
of this vowel in modern English, is that of Palsgrave, who, in his 
chapter on the French vowel, says : " The soundyng of a, which 
is most generally used throughout the Frenche tonge, is such as 
we use with us where the best English is spoken, which is lyke 
as the Italians sound aP There is no doubt that the Italian pro- 
nunciation of a was the same in the sixteenth century as at pres- 
ent, and hence it would appear that in Palsgrave's time, the normal 
English sound of a was as it is heard in father, or what orthoepists 



* Gil, who was a native of Lincolnshire, but resided in London as head- 
master of St. Paul's school, speaks of six dialects : the common, the Northern, 
the Southern, the Eastern, the Western, and the poetic, but the exemplifica- 
tions he gives point as often to differences in grammar and vocabulary, as in 
orthoepy. As instances of fluctuations in pronunciation, evidently with refer- 
ence to what he calls the common dialect, he says that you was pronounced 
both yow and yu ; toil, broil, soil, often tuil, bruil, suil ; shall either shal or 
shaicl ; and buildeth, indifferently, buldeth, blledeth, beeldeth, and blldeth. This 
latter confusion must have arisen, not in popular speech, but from the em- 
barrassment occasioned by a foreign orthography ; for though build is English, 
the vowel combination ui is not, except in a very few native words beginning 
with g and q, in which latter case, u takes the place of w. 



Ltsct. xxnj THE ENGLISH A. 409 

generally call the Italian a. Palsgrave gives no English example, 
but though his statement cannot be accepted in its full extent, 
there seems to be no good reason for doubting that this sound 
was much more common in older than in more recent English. 
French words, introduced colloquially, would bring with them the 
French pronunciation, and in words derived from that source, 
some time would elapse before the vowels would take the sounds 
belonging to them in English orthography. But the orthography 
of Churchyarde shows that in words of Saxon etymology, as well 
as in many of French origin, the a was in his time pronounced as 
at present. He expresses this sound by ce, and writes meek, teem, 
ncem, meed, for make, tame, name, made, andflcem, dcem,fcem, 
for flame, dame, fame. It is a familiarly known fact that a had, 
until within a comparatively short period, the broad sound, as in 
wall, in many cases where we now pronounce it either as in father 
or as in hat. Ben Jonson lays down the rule that this vowel be- 
fore I, followed by another consonant, has always the broad sound, 
and he gives as examples the words salt, malt, halm, calm, in all 
of which he says the a sounds as in all, call, small, gall, fall, and 
tall. JBaicm is still the popular pronunciation of halm in many 
English and American localities, but calm is seldom or never heard 
with the broad a. Gil says that halm, fault, and half were popu- 
larly pronounced hawm, fawt, and hawf (or in his phonographic 
system, ham, fat, and hdf) but that many scholars articulated the 
I, and he writes them halm, fault, and half* The French nasal 
a would very naturally be changed in English into the broad a, 
to which it more nearly approximates than to the shorter sounds 
of this vowel, with which English writers on French pronuncia- 
tion usually compare it, and accordingly Gil informs us that in 
advance, chance, France, demand, the a was sounded broad, as 
in tall / and in dance, short or broad, indifferently, f 

*Mulcaster, p. 128, says calm, halm, calf, calves, salves, were pronounced in 
his time, cawm, hawm, cawlf, cawves, sawves. 

f French-English pronouncing dictionaries generally give the a in the Eng- 
lish sand as a near approximation to the French a nasalized in sans ; the o in 
the English bond as nearly equivalent of o nasal in the French ton. The 
French nasal a is much better represented by Gil's % and the nasal o is a more 
close sound than our short o, and in fact approximates nearer to the English 
long o. 

18 



410 THE LETTEE E. [Lect. xxn. 

In all the European languages, the pronunciation of e is a sub- 
ject of much difficult j, for, by almost imperceptible gradations, 
it runs through the whole scale between a in fate* and ee in see, the 
latter sound being the equivalent of the Continental long i. Gil, 
in describing the vowels, says e is short in net, and long iu neat. 
The short sound he represents by simple e, the long by e, and this 
vowel he distinguishes from the sound of ee in seen, Jceen, whether 
in words ordinarily spelled with one e, as in he, with two, as in 
the words just quoted, or with ie, as in 'believe, shield. He also 
distinguishes long e (e) from long a, which he represents by a. 
His standards for this latter sound are tale and male, and he em- 
ploys the character a before the liquid r, as well as before other 
consonants, as, for example, in care, careful, which he uniformly 
spells car, earful. The long e (e) of Gil, then, was neither our a 
in fate, nor our e in be, and he discriminates between them all, 
not only in the examples I have cited, but in express and une- 
quivocal terms.* 

* Ioxvottjv autem illam magnopere affectant livyooroloi nostrse Mopsse, quae 
quidem ita omnia attenuant, ut a et o non aliter perhorrescere videantur quani 
Appius Claudius z, sic etiam nostrse non emunt laun et Mmbrik, sindonis spe- 
cies, sed len et Mmbrik ; nee edunt kapn, caponem, sed k'epn, et fere k'ipn; 
nee unquam liguriunt bucherz met, butchers meate, i, carnem a laniis, sed bic- 
cherz mlt. Et quum sint omnes gintlimin, non gentlioimen, i, matronse nobiles, 
ancillas non vocant maidz sed medz. Logonomia Anglica, Second Edition, 
1621, p. 17. 

The only instances in which Gil seems to confound the sound of ea and of 
long e with long i {ee) are in the words appear, which he spells appier, near 
spelt nier, and dear spelt dier, upon which last word he remarks, " I cum e in 
diphthongum coalescit in dier dama vel cams." Logonomia, p. 15. 

But the confusion is apparent only, not real. Dear and near certainly, and 
appear probably, were pronounced with the sound of long ee, and did not 
rhyme with fear, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and doubtless in 
Gil's time. At that period, almost the only orthoepical sign commonly em- 
ployed in English was an acute accent, to indicate the long sound of e or ee, as 
may be seen in the old editions of Holinshed, and very many other authors of 
that time. Dear was then usually spelt deere ; near, neere ; whereas fear and 
most other words now written with that ending were spelt as at present, and 
without the accent. Numerous exemplifications of this will be found in Hol- 
inshed, as, for instance, on pp. 368, 369, 370, 371, vol. III., reprint of 1808. 

In the rules for the pronunciation of English at the end of Sherwood's Eng- 
lish and French Dictionary, London, 1650, the sound of e French is ascribed 
to the diphthongs ea and ei. 

Les dipthongues ea and ei se prononcent e, comme teach, deceive. 



Lect. xxn.j THE ENGLISH E. 411 

It is not easy to reconcile all Gil's examples with each other, or 
to determine what precise sound he indicates by the vowel e, for 
he employs it alike in words now pronounced with the sounds of 
e in be, e in let, and a in fate, and in others again where the pres- 
ent pronunciation is intermediate. In describing the vowels, he 
cites neat as an example of the sound of e, but in his table, the 
standard for it is least, and the combination ea is almost always 
represented in his orthography by e. Thus he writes dead, death, 
head, lead, (noun,) pleasure, sweat, (present tense,) ded, deth, hed, 
led, plezur, swet. In all these the vowel is now short e. Cleave, 
grease, leaf, leaves, sea, mean, meat, weak, wheat, in all which 
the vowel, as now pronounced, is the long e, he spells clev, gres, 
lef, levz, se, men, met, wek, whet. Break and great, at present 
sounded as if written drake and grate, are brek and gret in Gil's 
system, andfcwbear, earth, learned, swear, are forber, erth, lerned, 
swer. Heaven he spells sometimes hevn, and sometimes hevn. 
He also uses the same character to express the vowel sound of e in 
Grecian, these, were, there, perch, theirs, and they, writing Gre- 
cian, 5ez, wer, 5er, perch, 5erz, and 5ei, though in one instance 
he spells this last word " thei or thai." 

Palsgrave, speaking of the French e, says : " Sometyme they 
sounde him lyke as we do in our tonge in beere, beest, peere, beene, 
but e in Frenche hath never such a sounde as we use to gyve him 
in a beere [bier] to lay a dead corpse on ; peere, a mate or fellow ; 
a bee, such as maketh honny, and as we sound our pronouns we, 
me, he, sheP In Palsgrave's time, then, beast and bean were 
pronounced, nearly at least, baste and bane, as they still are in 
Ireland, and provincially in England. Taking this statement in 
connection with the fact that Gil distinguishes e from both a and 
'i, and comparing the words which he spells with e, I think we 
are authorized to conclude that he intended to indicate by it a 
sound corresponding to that of e in the French fete, which, 
the Anglo-French dictionaries to the contrary notwithstanding, is 

Be, dipthongue, on prononce i, comme need, seed, breed, speed, creed. 

Hence it is evident that the vowel sound in teach, receive, was not that of ee 
in need, but was the Continental e. See Coryat's Travels, p. 352. 

In the time of Swift, the normal or alphabetical pronunciation of e in Latin 
was our modern long a. Hence he represents amice venerabilis by am I say 
vain a rabbU is. 



412 THE ENGLISH E. [Lect. xxn. 

not the sound of a in fate, but much more nearly that of e in 
there, as usually pronounced in New England. The e in there, 
in the New England pronunciation, is the long vowel correspond- 
ing to the short a in man, so that hair and hat, or, better still, 
pare and parry, care and carry, respectively exemplify the long 
and short sounds of the vowel.* 

Most English orthoepists, I believe, now maintain that the 
sound of e in there, and of ai in pair, is identical with that of a 
in fate, and say \hsX paw, a couple, is precisely equivalent in pro- 
nunciation to payer, he that pays. It is certain that, at least un- 
til very recently, educated persons in this country did make a dis- 
tinction between these sounds, precisely analogous in kind to that 
between the French e and e ; that is, a in pate and payer bore 
the same relation to a in pair, or e in there, that e in peri ode 
bears to e in p e r e . I cannot help thinking that the English 
themselves do at this moment, in practice, generally discriminate 
between these vowel sounds, though theoretically they deny the 
distinction. But, nevertheless, the authority of pronouncing dic- 
tionaries is likely to prevail, and thus one of the radical sounds of 
the language, a sound which is a recognized orthoepical element 
in almost every known speech, will, not improbably, be banished 
from the English tongue. "The ignorance of grammarians has 
done much to corrupt our language, the dulness of orthoepists 
much to confuse our pronunciation. The inability of Walker and 
his school to distinguish between the sounds we are considering, 

* A passage in Harvey's Letter to Spenser, Haslewood II. 281, though writ- 
ten for another purpose, shows that fair and other words of like sound had 
two pronunciations, one of which was probably with the vowel sound of a in 
fate, the other that referred to in the text : "Marry, I confesse, some wordes 
we have indeede, as, for example, fayer, either for beautiful, or for a Marte ; 
ayer both proaere, and prohserede * * which are commonly, and 
maye indifferently be used eyther wayes. For you shal as well, and as ordi- 
narily heare fayer as faire, and Aier as Aire." Harvey is here particularly 
referring to the pronouncing of these words as monosyllables or as dissyllables. 
Now, by pronouncing them with the a in fate, we inevitably make them dis- 
syllables, because our long a is diphthongal, but if we give the vowel the sound 
of e in the French f £te, they become monosyllabic, because the vowel is 
simple. 'Squire is popularly pronounced square in New England. Probably 
the pronunciation was the same in England in Ben Jonson's time, for square 
(quadrate) is spelled squire by the printers, in the Silent Woman, Act V., Scene 
L, ed. of 1640. 



Lect. xxn.] THE ENGLISH I. 413 

is a fruit of the same obtuseness of ear which led them to con- 
found the y final of such words as society, with e in he, and thus 
to obliterate the distinction between the long and short sounds, 
which characterizes especially the orthoepy of all the Gothic lan- 
guages. For a reason which will be given in another lecture, the 
vowel sounds and shades of sound are particularly numerous in 
those languages, and the Gothic ear was keenly sensible to very 
subtle distinctions ; but we are diverging from their and our own 
primitive articulation, in all points but accentuation, and unless a 
reaction takes place, we shall soon be reduced to as meagre a list 
of vowel sounds as belong to the Spanish or Italian.* 

The orthoepy of the vowel i is attended with less difficulty than 
that of e, and there is reason to think that the long and short 
sounds it serves to indicate have remained essentially unchanged 
for centuries. The analogy of the other Gothic languages would 
lead us to expect to find the short sound wherever the vowel is 
followed by two consonants in the same syllable ; but, contrary to 
this rule, i before Id or nd is, in English, almost uniformly long. 
Churchyard e indeed gives to i in child the short sound as in did, 
will, but this is probably either a misprint or a provincialism, for 
in the Ormulum, child, as well as hind, mind, wild, is spelt with 
a single liquid, which, in the orthography of that work, indicates 
that the preceding vowel is long. In chilldre, the plural of child, 
on the contrary, the i is made short by reduplicating the I, whence 
it appears that in Ormin's time, or at least dialect, the singular 
and plural of this noun were distinguished much as at present. 
"We pronounce the noun wind, in prose, with the short i, in poetry 
often with the long vowel, but the verb to wmd is always pro- 

* By admitting that the words spelled by Gil with e were pronounced with the 
sound of French e, Italian e, German and Swedish a, and properly distinguishing 
this vowel from our diphthongal long a, we bring early English orthoepy into 
harmony with that of the cognate languages, so far as respects a very large 
class of words common to them all. We are, indeed, still left with the puz- 
zling question, how so many of them have lately acquired the sound of our 
modern long e, the Continental i. Of this I confess myself unable to offer a 
solution, but no philologist will deny that at some period of the Anglican 
tongue, the vowel in most of these words had the sound of the Continental e, 
and it is as easy to explain the change upon the supposition that it took place 
within two centuries, as upon the theory that it was made in the Anglo-Saxon 
period. 



414 THE ENGLISH I. [Lect. xxn. 

nounced with i long. Neither of these words occurs in the Or- 
mulum, but there are derivatives from both, and these are spelt 
with two nn, so that in the thirteenth century both probably took 
the short vowel.* 

It is an observation more familiar to foreign phonologists than 
to ourselves, that the English long vowels are nearly all diph- 
thongs, that is, the proper long sound in combination with that of 
e, (the Continental i,) or in some cases u. Thus our a in day, and 
even in fate, is really a, (the Continental e,) + e. Churchyarde 
had detected this, and it is a proof of the acuteness of his ear that 
he should have made so nice an observation, though he is not al- 
ways accurate in his resolution of the diphthong. He represents 
long a by ce, and writes make, meek ; take, tceJc, and the like. The 
diphthongal character of our long vowels, though obvious enough 
in the case of a and e, is less so in o and u, where the subordinate 
element is the obscure u, but it is very palpable and conspicuous 
in the long i, which is a true diphthong, consisting of the a in 
father followed by e, and in many Continental languages the 
same or a very similar sound is represented by the combination 
ai. Churchyarde, mistaking the true character of i long, ex- 
presses it by ye, making y the principal, e the auxiliary vowel, and 
he writes whine, strike, respectively whyene, stryelce. John 
Knox, who was a contemporary of Churchyarde, founded his or- 
thography on a similar principle, but he employs the vowel i as 
the subordinate element, or sign of prosodical length, where 
Churchyarde uses e. Thus he spells make, maik ; beer, heir j 
beast, heist; priest, preist ; like, lyiTc; wife, wyif ; restore, rer 
stoir ; and book, l)uilc.\ 

Spenser, in his Mother Hubberds Tale, has these lines : 

Whilome (said she) before the world was civill, 
The Foxe and th' Ape, disliking of their evill 

* Gil, p. 10, spells the noun, wind, wjnd, which indicates the long sound of 
the vowel. 

f Other Scottish and English writers had adopted a similar orthography at 
an earlier period, hut Knox is more consistent and uniform in his adherence to 
it than is King James, Bellenden, or any other writer of that nation whose 
works I have examined. 

Capgrave, pp. 340, 341, makes prmt a dissyllable. Teuthonista has Boick 
for look. 



Lect xxii.] LONG VOWELS DIPHTHONGAL. 415 

And hard estate, determined to seeke 

Their fortunes f arre abroad, lyeke with his tyeke. 

Here the e serves, not to lengthen the y, bnt as a diaeresis, to 
resolve the diphthong into its constituent parts, and make like an 
iambus. Whenever, in pronouncing snch words as like, we dwell 
much on the vowel, it becomes very distinctly diphthongal, and 
we make the monosyllable a dissyllable, as Spenser, to help at 
once rhyme and metre, has done. The difference is barely this. 
In our ordinary pronunciation of the combination ae, represented 
by long * in English, we habitually accent the first vowel element, 
the a, and this articulation, a being sounded as in father, would 
be expressed by writing like, lei-eke / but if we transfer the ac- 
cent to the e, the final element, we make it a dissyllable, la-eke. 

French words, transferred to English, naturally retain for some 
time the Continental pronunciation of this vowel, but in most 
combinations it tends to conform itself to English orthoepy. 
Oblige, for example, in its complimentary sense, is a word recent- 
ly introduced from France, for this is a meaning unknown to 
Shakespeare, and, as a word of ceremonial phraseology, it was at 
first pronounced obleege, but it is now almost uniformly articula- 
ted with the English sound of * long. 

The vowel o is almost as vague and uncertain as e. "With re- 
spect to the long o, Gil differs very little from modern orthoepists, 
but Churchyarde is not so easily reconciled with our present pro- 
nunciation. In accordance with his general system of vowel- 
notation, he represents long o by the combination oe, and writes 
in that way most of the syllables now sounded with long o, but he 
applies the same notation to many now pronounced very differ- 
ently. Thus, school he writes skoel, poor jpoer, shoot shoett, lose 
loes, good goed, blood bloed, blush bloeshe, and push poeshe. On 
the other hand, Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie, denies 
that poor, or even door, is pronounced with long o. "If one 
should rime," says he, " to this word, (restore,) he may not match 
him with doore or poore, for neither of both are of like terminant 
either by good orthography or in natural sound." * Ben Jonson 
ascribes to this letter two sounds. " In the long time," observes 

* Gil writes doors, durz, and of course ascribes to the oo in door the same 
sound as we now do in poor. 



416 THE ENGLISH O. [Lect. xxii. 

he, "o soundeth sharp and high," and he assimilates it to the 
Greek H. This is evidently our long o in note, and our author 
cites that word, together with chosen, hosen, holy, open, over, 
throte, and folly as exemplifying it. Jonson, therefore, must 
have pronounced folly as if written, .foly, and in several of his 
poems he rhymes it with holy, which, indeed, would now be al- 
lowable, not as a perfect rhyme, but by poetic license, " In the 
short time," continues he, " it soundeth more flat and akin to u," 
and of this he cites as instances the words cosen, dozen, mother, 
brother, love, and prove. Had he stopped here we should have 
inferred that prove was in Jonson's time pronounced pruv, be- 
cause all his other examples have now the vowel sound of short 
u. But inasmuch as in a Latin note to this passage, he says that 
this sound was generally expressed in English by double oo, and 
that it corresponded exactly to the French ou, we should conclude 
that the u to which he compares the short o was not the short u 
in hut, but perhaps the u in full, (which is not related to u in 
hut, but is a short vowel corresponding to long oo in pool,) and, 
consequently, that these words were pronounced respectively 
coosin, doozen, moother, hroother, loove. In fact, Laneham, 
Spenser in his letter to Harvey, and many other authors of the 
latter part of the sixteenth century, write these very words with 
oo, and the frequency of such rhymes as love prove, love move, 
would seem to lend some support to the theory that they were all 
pronounced as they would be according to our present orthoepy, 
if spelt with oo. But the question is by no means so easily dis- 
posed of .* Gil says that u is " tenuis aut crassa : tenuis est in 
verbo tu vz, use, utor; crassa brevis est u, ut in pronomine 
us, nos"; and in his table of sounds, he employs the participle 
spun, as the standard exemplication of this sound ; spoon, (in his 
orthography, spun,) for long u. The short sound he indicates by 
the common form of the vowel, and he spells dozen, brother, 
mother, love, respectively, duzn, hmiher, muher, luv, thus direct- 
ly contradicting Jonson's rule, and assigning to these words a 
pronunciation precisely like that of our day. On the other hand, 
he uses the same vowel in many instances, where we now pro- 
nounce words with the normal sound of oo, as for example gud 

* See observations in N. American Review, 1864. 



Lect. xxil] THE ENGLISH IT. 417 

good, ivud wood, wuman (sing.) woman, ful full, (and all the ter- 
minations in ful short also,) push push, hush bush, wul wool. 
Most of these words occur in numerous instances in the Logo- 
nomia, and though it seems improbable that they were ever pro- 
nounced with the sound of u in us, yet they are too carefully 
distinguished from words with the long sound of oo to be sup- 
posed to be typographical errors. In the many other words 
where this very common English sound is met with, Gil's nota- 
tion is in accordance with modern usage. Gil and Jonson were 
contemporaries, and both residents of London. To reconcile 
them seems impossible, and we must therefore conclude that the 
pronunciation of the words concerning which they disagree was 
very unsettled.* 

There has been some question whether the present pronuncia- 
tion of u in nature, and other like combinations, is of recent ori- 
gin, but the authority of Gil shows that it was employed in his 
time, for he distinguishes the u in words of that termination both 
from u in us, and from the simple long u or oo in ooze, which he- 
expresses by the character iX. He spells nature and literature, 
natvr, literatvr, employing the same sign as in use, which he 
writes vz, and those words must of course have been articulated 
much as they are at this day. 

"Whether there were any true diphthongs in Old-English, and if 
not, when they were introduced, is a question which cannot now 
be answered. In the Ormulum, we have the vowel combinations : 
03, represented by a single character, and probably pronounced as 
a single vowel ; eo, usually represented in modern orthography 

* Mulcaster's observations upon the vowel o do not aid much in removing 
the difficulty. He remarks, p. 115, " O soundeth as much upon the u which 
is his cosin, as upon the 6 which is his naturall ; as in cosen, dozen, mother, 
which o is still naturallie short, and hozen, frozen, mother, which o is natu- 
rallie long." On p. 152, he explains the apparent discrepancy in his notation 
of mother, by writing mother, the female parent, mother, mother ; a slatternly 
girl, mother. On p. 116 he writes to, preposition, tw5, do, undo, remove, with 
the same sign as cozen, dozen, mother, whence we should infer that the vowel 
sounds- were alike, but he also writes glove, dove, and shove, in the same way. 
To the word love he assigns two sounds, love and love, one being the verb, the 
other the noun, though it does not appear which part of speech has the grave, 
and which the acute, accent. The rhyming poetry of that period (1575) might 
determine this question. 
18* 



418 CONSONANTS IN ENGLISH. [Lect. xxn. 

and perhaps orthoepy by ee ; and the vowel and semi- vowel com- 
binations aw, ew, and ow. Besides these, w is nsed before all the 
vowels, and i long may have had the same diphthongal character 
as at present. After e and o always, and generally after a, the 
w is doubled, which implies that the vowel preceding was short ; 
and the probability is that those combinations were articulated as 
true diphthongs. The orthography of some old manuscripts seems 
to indicate a very full and distinct pronunciation of both elements 
in these last combinations, as, for instance, in the metrical ro- 
mance of Sir Amadace, published by the Camden Society, where 
we find howundes, rowunde, jpowunde, commawund, for hounds, 
round, pound, command, (commaund /) and in the Avowynge 
of King Arthur in the same volume, rowuntable, wowundes, 
rawunsone, enoowunturinge, for round table, wounds, ransom, 
(raunson,) and encountering. Shakespeare, according to the 
Quarto Reprint of the edition of 1623, generally treated houres 
as a dissyllable : 

" So many Houres, must I tend my Flock ; 

So many Houres, must I take my Rest," &c. 
"If this right hand would buy two houres life," &c. ; 

but instances of its use as a monosyllable are not unfrequent in 
the same Reprint.* 

Consonants, though by no means unchangeable, are more stable 
than vowels, the law of their mutations is more constant, or at 
least better ascertained, and they frequently remain fixed in the 
written, after they have been lost or changed in sound, in the 
spoken dialect. f Hence, in researches into the history of lan- 

* See Eobert of Gloucester, p. 275. 

f French orthography presents a wider discrepancy between the written and 
spoken dialects than does that of any other European language. Landor, in 
his Conversation with Delille, asks, "What man of what nation, ancient or 
modern, could imagine the existence of a people on the same globe with him- 
self, who employ the letters e au x to express the sound of o ? " In fairness 
he should have allowed Delille, by way of set-off, to run through the list of 
sounds, simple and compound, which we express by the formidable combina- 
tion, ough. The etymology of a large proportion of the French vocabulary is 
traceable only by its written forms, for, as articulated, the words often lose all 
resemblance to their originals, and it is the suppression or change of consonants 
that disguises them. Whether the orthography ever represented the pronun- 
ciation is very doubtful, and Genin has shown that some centuries since the 
discrepancy was even greater than it is now. 



Lect. xxn.] CONSONANTS IN ENGLISH. 419 

guage they are of cardinal importance, and consequently have al- 
most exclusively engaged the attention of etymologists, while, on 
the other hand, their supposed permanence, immutability, and dis- 
tinctness of character have led them to be much neglected by 
orthoepists, as elements too constant, obvious, and well understood, 
to require much investigation or explanation. But in point of 
fact, consonants are very far from being so well discriminated, or 
so permanent constituents of spoken language as is generally 
assumed. It is true that their differences are more easily appre- 
ciated by the ear, though less easily imitated by the tongue, than 
those between vowels, but he who observes the indistinct articu- 
lation of the consonants in Danish, the confounding of the hard 
and soft sounds of g in some dialects of Arabic, and of I and r in 
the Polynesian islands, in the island of Sardinia and in some parts 
of Switzerland, the separation in Italian and Spanish of conso- 
nants winch coalesce in English,* the almost inaudible difference 
between the two in some Oriental languages, not to speak of nu- 
merous other peculiarities of the like sort, will be convinced that 
our own consonants may deserve and repay a more careful study 
than English orthoepists have yet given them. The lower classes 
of the French Canadians habitually confound the mutes h and t, 
in certain combinations, and say mSMer, moikie for metier, 
moitie, and Moliere, in his Medecin Malgre Lui, makes 
Jacqueline say amiquie for amitie, quarquie for quartier, etc. 



* I tliink what I have called the coalescence of consonants is more marked in 
English than in any of the sister tongues, except perhaps in Danish. It is par- 
ticularly obvious in our articulation of I, n, and r, followed by another conso- 
nant, and of I and r preceded by another consonant, in the same syllable, our 
pronunciation of which combinations is of a nasalized and at the same time of 
a- di-phthongal character, while in Spanish and Italian these elements are as 
distinctly and independently articulated as any others. By way of compensa- 
tion for this confusion of sound, we exaggerate the diaeresis of some conso- 
nants incapable of thus sliding into each other, and interpose an obscure vowel 
between them. Chasm and other words of similar ending are popularly pro- 
nounced as dissyllables, and in blossom, besom, bosom, and clirisom we have in- 
troduced a icritten vowel between the s and m of the radicals. The consonant m 
does not readily unite even with a preceding liquid, and hence the vulgar pro- 
nunciation ellum, helium, for elm, helm, and the word alarum for alarm. It is 
perhaps in this reluctance of m to coalesce with a preceding liquid, that we 
find the explanation of the suppression of the I in balm, calm, and other words 
of similar ending. 



420 THE ENGLISH B. [Lect. xxn 

The modern Italian fatto, (in the 14th century facto,) from the 
Latin factum, is a similar case of change of consonant; and in 
the collection of comedies called Le done in the Florentine dia- 
lect, are many curious illustrations of the confusion between t, c, 
and h. The double forms n u n c i u s and nuntius, and the 
like, show that the Romans did the same thing, if, as has been 
supposed, their c had always the force of k* The interchange of 
these mutes also explains the double forms in English of tat and 
hack, brittle and brickie, tinol (whence tinder) and kindle. 

An extraordinary instance of this particular confusion occurs in 
the remarks on pronunciation prefixed to the edition of Webster's 
large dictionary printed in 1828. In that essay, the lexicographer, 
whose most conspicuous defects were certainly not those of the 
ear, after having devoted a lifetime to the study of English or- 
thoepy and etymology, informs the student that, " The letters cl 
answering to kl are pronounced as if written tl y <?Zear, cZean, are 
pronounced ^ear, tfZean. Gl is pronounced dl ; glorj is pro- 
nounced dlory" 

The pronunciation of the English consonants in general par- 
takes of the stability which marks their articulation in other lan- 
guages, and there is good reason to believe that it is, in this respect, 
more accordant with the Anglo-Saxon, than are the cognate 
Scandinavian dialects with their Old-Northern original. 

The b of the English alphabet is very pure and distinct in its 
pronunciation, showing no tendency to the more explosive artic- 
ulation of some German dialects, or the more fricative of the 
Spanish, and I am aware of no reason for supposing that it has 
undergone any change as an element of English orthoepy, f 

* What was the pronunciation of the Latin c is a question of the same order 
as : what is the pronunciation of the Italian c t See Cortecelli and Plorio. 

f The pedant Holofernes in Love's Labor's Lost criticizes the pronunciation 
of the coxcomb Don Adriano de Armado, and calls him a ' racker of orthog- 
raphy,' because he ' speaks dout fine, when he should say doubt; det when he 
should pronounce debt, d,e,b,t, not d,e,t.' The ingenious commentator of the 
excellent edition of Shakespeare lately published in Boston, hence argues that 
consonants now silent were, in Shakespeare's time, heard on the lips of pur- 
ists, and that the change from the ancient pronunciation, (in which he sup- 
poses these consonants to have been articulated,) to the modern in which they 
are silent, took place between 1575 and 1625, and he cites Butler's Grammar of 
1633, to show that at that period b was not pronounced in either of the words 
in question, and was retained in spelling merely to show their derivation from 



Lect. xxii.] THE ENGLISH C. 421 

The Anglo-Saxon c had very probably the double force of the 
Italian c, representing, in different combinations, ch and k, which 
latter consonant did not properly belong to the native alphabet, 
though not absolutely unknown to it. "When it preceded n at the 
beginning of words, as in cneow, knee, cndwan, to know, and 
cnotta, knot, there can be little doubt that it was pronounced as h 
now is in similar combinations in modern German ; but it became 
silent soon after the Norman Conquest, and c has since undergone 
little if any change of sound. 

the Latin. The only authority for the position that they ever were pro- 
nounced in English is the criticism of Holof ernes which I have just cited. 
Holofernes is at once a pedant and an ignoramus. His English and his 
Latin are equally barbarous, and the testimony of such a person would 
be insufficient to establish the position, even if uncontradicted. But the evi- 
dence to the contrary appears to me strong, and I am persuaded that there 
never was a period when the b was commonly sounded in either word, though 
individuals may have been guilty of such an affectation. Debt and doubt are 
descended from the Latin words d e b e o and d u b i t o , but we derived them 
from the French, not the Latin, at a period when French was as familiarly used 
in England as English itself, and of course, as in other cases, we took them 
with the French pronunciation. The arguments of Genin in his Recreations 
Philologiques, and the express words of Palsgrave, p. 26, show satisfactorily 
that in the French debte and doubte, the old forms of dette and doute, the b was 
not sounded even when it was written. Robert of Gloucester, in the thirteenth 
century, p. 73, writes dette, and p. 89, doute. Bet, dette, dout, doute, and dought, 
were the regular spelling until after the Reformation, and numerous examples 
of these forms occur in Lord Berners's Froissart, and in other writers of that 
and earlier centuries. With the diffusion of classical literature, as I have else- 
where remarked, came in an orthography more consonant to etymology, but it 
was long before the orthoepy of the reformed words underwent a correspond- 
ing change. The combination bt is almost unpronounceable. It does not oc- 
cur in Anglo-Saxon, and in that language even the pt of the cognate dialects 
passes into ft. The combination ct presents no such difficulty, but we learn from 
Campion, (Haslewood's Collection II. 187,) that in 1602, perfect, though the c 
had now been introduced into the written language, was still pronounced per- 
fet. Spenser rhymes set her and debtor ; shout and dout. Gil quotes the verses 
containing this last rhyme B. IV. C. III. 41, without remark, spelling doubt, 
dout; and on page 83, where there is no question of rhyme, he spells doubtful 
without the b. B. Jonson, Ep. 71 to K. James, rhymes doubt and devout ; 73, let- 
ter and debtor ; 119, bet and debt. In these cases, as in hundreds of others, the 
pronunciation of the b would have destroyed the rhyme. It is then certain, 
that, before the Reformation, the b in these words was not even written ; the 
testimony of Gil shows that it was not pronounced in 1621 ; and that of But- 
ler, cited by Mr. White, is positive that it was silent in 1633. We have also the 
evidence of rhyme that it was not pronounced in the interval, and Holofernes 
is not a credible witness to the contrary. 



422 THE ENGLISH F AND G. [Lect. xxn. 

The confusion into which Anglo-Saxon orthography was thrown 
by the introduction of the Latin and French elements, bringing 
with them an alphabet differing more or less from the Saxon in 
the form and power of its letters, soon led to the abandonment of 
the characters not common to the orthography of both the native 
and the foreign tongues. The Saxon f) and 5, representing the 
two sounds of th, which were wanting in Latin and French, were 
dropped, and though there was much irregularity in the use of 
substitutes for them, d was very frequently employed for the 5, 
and f a 5 e r , father, was accordingly written fader. The employ- 
ment of d for two purposes occasioned confusion in orthoepy, and 
this consonant was not only sounded as th in native words origi- 
nally spelled with 5, but it took the th sound in some others, and 
sometimes even in Latin pronunciation. Palsgrave warns the 
pupil against pronouncing the d in the French words adoption, 
adoulcer, "like th, as we of our tonge do in these wordes of 
Latine, ath adjuvandum for ad adjuvandum, corruptly." This 
explains Fluellen's pronunciation of adversary as adversary in 
Henry Y., advertised cited in Halliwell, and other like cases. 
The more general substitution of th for 5 has removed this source 
of embarrassment, and the consonant d seems to have undergone 
no other change in articulation. 

i^had formerly the sound of v more frequently than at pres- 
ent. In some provincial dialects it took and still retains the force 
of v, even when initial. Ben Jonson cites the participles cleft 
and left as both having the f sounded like f in of, preposition, 
which he distinguishes as we do from the adverb off, and he com- 
pares the sound in of, deft, to the Latin v, that in off to the Greek 
£>, but Gil ascribes to they in cleft its normal sound. The pres- 
ent tendency is to make the plural of nouns in rf like wharf, in 
fs rather than ves, and/ 1 in ^probably retains the v sound, only 
to distinguish it from off. 

G, in such words as length, strength, where we consider it a 
gross vulgarism to suppress it, appears to have been often silent. 
Churchy arde spells these words leynth, streynth / John Knox 
'tenth and strenth. The same forms occur in the Political Songs 
published by the Camden Society, and Halliwell gives several in- 
stances of the latter from old manuscript authorities. The com- 
bination gh was originally a guttural or perhaps a palatal, and it 



Lect. xxh.] THE ENGLISH H. 423 

appears to have had this peculiar force even down to the time of 
Gil.* " Grsecorum X," says he, " in initio nnnqnam usurpa- 
mus ; in medio, et in fine, ssepe, et per gh male experimimns." 
He proposes a special character to express this sonnd, as standards 
for which, he cites weight and enough, in the text, and bought, in 
the table. He uniformly employs this character in high, knight,, 
though, through, and other words of the same ending, bnt re- 
marks that, in the common dialect, enough was often pronounced 
enuff, instead of with the guttural. 

The rough aspirate h had formerly a much greater importance 
in the orthoepy of the European languages than it at present 
possesses. 

The Greeks and Romans certainly normally articulated the 
Grecian rough breathing and the Latin h, but the modern Greeks, 
the Italians, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese, have lost the 
sound altogether, though they still retain h in their orthograjDhy, 
generally either to determine the sound of other consonants or to 
distinguish one word from another. It is slightly heard in 
French, except in very emphatic utterance, and some orthoepists 
deny that it is used at all. The present tendency of all the Euro- 
pean languages is to its absolute suppression, and it is not impos- 
sible that it may vanish from even English orthoepy as complete- 
ly as it has done from that of the South of Europe, f There 
seems to have been a good deal of embarrassment with respect to 
the use of the letter h in the Latin language. Manuscripts and 
inscriptions often omit or misapply it, but its omission where it 
ought properly to be aspirated, was nevertheless regarded as a 
flagrant violation of the rules of good taste. " If one," says St. 
Augustine, freely translated, " contrary to the laws of orthoepy, 
murders the word human by calling it uman, without the aspi- 
ration, he will more offend his hearers than if he had committed a 
real homicide" % The first step towards the abolition of the h in 

* Shakespeare has : 

Have you not heard it said full oft, 

A woman's nay doth stand for nought t 

The Passionate Pilgrim, XIV. 

f See Rietz, Svenska Allmoge Sproket, p. 233. Also Fanfani, Vocabulario 
delV Uso Toscano, p. 469. 
X Ut qui ilia sonorum Vetera placita teneat ant doceat, si contra disciplinam 



424 THE ENGLISH H. [Lect. xxn. 

English consisted in its suppression before the liquids I, n, and r. 
In Anglo-Saxon ladder, ladle, lady, laugh, were all written with 
the initial hi ; neck, nut, and the verb to neigh, with hn • ready, 
raven, ring, with hr, and this was also the orthography of the 
same words in the Old-Northern. What the precise force of h 
was in this combination is uncertain, but as it is now a distinct 
rough breathing in these words in Icelandic, it probably had the 
same sound in Saxon. It disappeared very early from English 
words of this class, and these combinations do not occur in the 
Ormulum. A more important change in the use of the h was its 
transposition in words beginning with hw, (which is rather a 
Scandinavian than a Teutonic combination,) and its gradual sup- 
pression in the articulation of that combination. Saxon words 
beginning with hw are, in the Ormulum, in Layamon, and some- 
times even in older Saxon authors, spelt with wh, and this de- 
rangement of the letters has been thought to indicate a difference 
of pronunciation. But in words of this class where we pronounce 
the h at all, we articulate it before the w, as for instance in whale. 
Although, therefore, in this combination the h orthographically 
follows, it orthoepically precedes the w, and this was probably the 
Anglo-Saxon pronunciation. Many of us remember when in 
white and other words of this class, at least in this country, the h 
was always distinctly heard, as it always ought to be. At present 
it is fast disappearing from this combination. This is a corruption 
which originated, not with the vulgar, but in French influence 
and the affectations of polished society. The combination of h 
and w, or h and v, occurs in the Scandinavian languages, but it does 
not at present exist in German.'* In some of the Scandinavian lo- 
cal dialects, the h is still sounded before % in others it is no longer 
heard, the influence of the Romance languages having there, as it 
has in a much more marked way in England, tended to bring 
about the suppression of the aspiration. The process appears to 
have commenced at an early period, for Lord Berners wrote, or 

grammaticam, sine aspiratione primse syllabas, ominem dixerit, displiceat magis 
hominibus, quani si contra tua precepta hominem oderit, cum sit homo. 

Conf. I. 29. 
See also Cicero, ed. Schiitz, p. 129. 

* Zahn and other earlier philologists recognize hw or hv as existing in Moeso- 
Gothic orthoepy, but it is not admitted by Massmann, Diefenbach, or Stamm. 



Lect. xxn.] THE ENGLISH L. 425 

at least Pynson printed, wo and who, were and where, indiffer- 
ently, and we may thence infer that the pronunciation had already 
begun to vacillate. Indeed, we find similar forms in Robert of 
Gloucester, but these may be dialectic. 

The liquid I appears to have served in many combinations, in 
both early English and French, no other purpose than to 
lengthen, or otherwise modify, the vowel preceding ; but as it 
was undoubtedly always articulated in Saxon, its suppression in 
such words as half, calf, balm, calm, and the like, is to be 
ascribed, if not to the reason assigned in a note to a previous 
page, to IsTorman influence.* In many words of Saxon origin, as 
for instance in could and would, it was generally pronounced un- 
til a recent period. The old New England pronunciation of these 
words was coold, woold, and Ben Jonson writes Pld for Pd, the 
popular contraction of I would. In Gil's phonographic system, 
the I is always written in such words, and it was of course articu- 
lated. We have, on the other hand, in conformity to the cor- 
rected orthography of many words of French origin, recently 
introduced it in some cases where it was formerly silent. In the 
sixteenth century Englishmen wrote and pronounced soudyours, 
assaut. At a later period, they spelt and articulated the I in 
both, and it is worth noticing that the French have done the 

* Suckling, in the middle of the seventeenth century, as appears by a pas- 
sage quoted by Alibone, under Carew, pronounced fault with a silent I, for he 
rhymes it with laureate: 

Tcm Carew was next, but he had & fault, 
That would not well stand with a laureat. 

Laneham, in 1575, wrote sJcro for scroll. This pronunciation suggests a 
probable etymology for a word which has much embarrassed lexicographers. 
The Icelandic noun skra means skin or parchment, whence the verbs s k r a 
and skrasetja, to write or record. From skra comes the old Danish S k r a a , 
(pronounced skro,) a written ordinance or law, and I think also our scroll, and 
the Norman English escrow. Scrowis occurs in Wycliffe, Matth. xxiii. 5. 

In Richard Coer de Lion, Weber, II. 133, we find : 

Looke every mannys name thoro wryte 
Upon a scrowe of parcheymn, &c. 

And in Capgrave, p. 260 : "In this tyme the Lolardis set up Scrowis at 
Westminster and at Poules, with abhominable accusaciones of hem that long 
to the cherch," &c. 

Swift, Boston ed., Vol. II., p. 545, uses scraw for turf. (Italian cotica, 
sward.) 



426 THE ENGLISH E. [Lect. xxn 

same tiling with respect to the former word, the soudard of 
older writers, itself a corruption of a still earlier form, souldard, 
having become the s o 1 d a t of recent times. There are many 
instances in the English poetry of the sixteenth, and earlier cen- 
turies, where the liquid I stands for a syllable of itself. For ex- 
ample, the preterites or participles dazzled and humbled must 
have been pronounced as trisyllables, dazzeled, humbeled. Traces 
of this pronunciation yet remain in both Englaad and this coun- 
try. Ignorant persons call the elm tree ellum, and helium is the 
regular nautical pronunciation of helm.* 

The former English pronunciation of the letter r was probably 
much the same as in the modern French, "it," says Ben Jon- 
son, " is the dog's letter and hurreth in the sound, the tongue strik- 
ing the inner palate with a trembling about the teeth. It is 
sounded firm in the beginning of words, and more liquid in the 
middle and end, as rarer, rijperP 

The Anglo-Saxon alphabet, as I have more than once had occa- 
sion to observe, had two characters corresponding to those of the 
Icelandic, to express the two sounds of th, which are absurdly dis- 
tinguished by many grammarians as respectively the flat and 
sharp articulations. According to analogy with the Old-North- 
ern, the character J should represent th in thm, or the Greek O ; 
5, th in this, or the modern Greek A, and there is little doubt that 
this was their original force. But in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, 
the two are often confounded or interchangeably employed, and 
some grammarians have even supposed that in that orthography, 
their sounds were precisely the reverse of those appropriated to 
them in the Scandinavian alphabet. In any event it seems quite 
certain that we have in many cases substituted the hard sound for 
the soft, and the contrary, though we cannot determine when the 
change took place, f 

The recent introduction of the w, in the combination wh in 
several words, is remarkable. Whole, in the Saxon root, and the 

* See note at page 419. 

f White argues that th was sounded as t in Shakespeare's time, but Ben Jon- 
son in the Masque of Augurs writes the foreign pronunciation of Van Goose, 
affecting to be an Englishman, as ting for thing, noting for nothing, which he 
would not have done had such been the usual pronunciation. See also Ben 
Jonson's English Grammar, which is decisive on this point. 



Lect. xxii.] THE ENGLISH WH. 427 

correspondiug word in the cognate languages, were without the 
w, and whole and its derivatives were usually written without it 
in English, until the latter part of the sixteenth century.* So 
hot, which in Anglo-Saxon was spelt with h only, occasionally re- 
ceived a w at the same period. W/wrtleoerry is an instance of the 
same sort. Whether the w was ever articulated in whole, whole- 
some, or in whot, we cannot determine, but it is difficult to account 
for its introduction on any other suj^position. On the other hand, 
this semi-vowel has been rejected from the orthography of many 
words where it was once written and pronounced, and it is silent in 
pronunciation in many words where it is still written. Several Sax- 
on words began with wl. These are all, I believe, obsolete, though 
we have derivatives of two of them in lukewarm, and loth, loathe, 
and loathsome. These last words, as well as one or two others, 
retained the initial w until the fifteenth century, and it doubtless 
had some orthoepical force, though we cannot pronounce upon its 
precise character. It was unquestionably anciently articulated 
before r, in such words as write, wrong, wrench, &c. What its 
precise force was cannot now be ascertained, but it appears to 
have had a distinct sound, in such combinations, till near the end 
of the sixteenth century, and even later if the authority of Mul- 
caster and Gil is to be relied on. The former says in express 
terms, that w is a consonant in the word wrong, and Gil, whose 
phonography rejects all silent letters, retains the w in wrath, 
wrathful, wretch, and wretched. Even at the present day, in 
some of the English provincial dialects, the words write, right, 
rite, are all clearly distinguished in articulation. 

From these remarks it will be evident that our present subject 
is involved in great obscurity, but, nevertheless, it seems a safe 
conclusion, that the pronunciation of our language has been upon 
the whole considerably softened, perhaps it would be more accu- 
rate to say, has become more confused, within the last two or 
three centuries, and is less clear, distinct, and sonorous than it 
was in earlier ages. I have endeavored to show, in a previous 
lecture, that the art of printing is exerting a restorative influence 

* Wliole may possibly be from the Anglo-Saxon walg ; but the etymolog- 
ical analogies of the sister-tongues are to the contrary ; and as w never entered 
into the orthography of whole until Anglo-Saxon was forgotten, the derivation 
from h a 1 is more Drobable. 



428 THE ENGLISH WH. [Lect. xxii. 

on English pronunciation. The study of AngloSa-xon and Old- 
English grammar will be attended with like results. We may, 
therefore, hope that the further corruption of our orthoepy will 
be arrested, and that we may recover something of the fulness 
and distinctness of articulation, which appear to have characterized 
the ancient Anglican tongue.* 

* Scholars familiar with Ellis's learned and able essay on Early English pro- 
nunciation will find many of the foregoing observations superfluous, many 
more, I fear, ill-founded ; but it is too late for me to attempt a revisal of my 
statements, and I must let them go for what they are worth, contenting myself 
with referring to the labors of Mr. Ellis as not only more complete, but as bet- 
ter authority than my own. 

I would also once more refer the reader to a very able article on this subject 
in the North American Review, 1864. 






LECTUKE XXIII. 

RHYME. 

An important difference between the great classes of languages 
which we have considered in former lectures — those, namely, 
abounding in grammatical inflections, and those comparatively 
destitute of them— is the more ready adaptability of the inflected 
tongues to the conventional forms of poetical composition. In 
other words, they more easily accommodate themselves to those 
laws of arrangement, sequence, and recurrence of sound — of 
rhythm, metre, and rhyme — by which verse addresses itself to 
the sensuous ear and enables that organ, without reference to the 
subject, purport, or rhetorical character of a given writing, to 
determine whether it is poetry or prose. An obvious element in 
this facility of application to poetical use, is the independence of 
the laws of position in syntax which belongs especially to in- 
flected languages, for it is evidently much easier to give a pro- 
sodical form to a period, if we are unrestricted in the arrange- 
ment of the words which compose it, than if the parts of speech 
are bound to a certain inflexible order of succession. Metrical 
convenience has introduced inversion among the allowable li- 
censes of English poetry, and some modern writers have indulged 
in it to a very questionable extent ; but at all events its use is 
necessarily very limited, and it cannot be employed at all without 
some loss of perspicuity. A more important poetical advantage 
of a flectional grammar, is the abundance of consonances which 
necessarily characterizes it. Wherever there are uniform termi- 
nations for number, gender, case, conjugation, and other gram- 
matical accidents, where there are augmentative, diminutive, 
and frequentative forms, there of course must be a correspond- 
ing copiousness of rhymes. English, possessing few inflections, 
has no large classes of similar endings. On the contrary, it is 
rich in variety of terminations, and for that reason poor in con- 

(429) 



430 ENGLISH POOE IN EHYMES. [Lect. xxm. 

sonances. The number of English words which have no rhyme 
in the language, and which, of course, cannot be placed at the 
end of a line, is very great. Of the words in Walker's Rhym- 
ing Dictionary, five or six thousand at least are without rhymes, 
and consequently can' be employed at the end of a verse only by 
transposing the accent, coupling them with an imperfect conso- 
nance or constructing an artificial rhyme out of two words. 
Of this class are very many important words well adapted for 
poetic use, such as warmth, month, wolf, gulf, sylph, music, 
breadth, width; depth, silver, honor, virtue, worship, circle, 
epic, earthbom, iron, citron, author, echo / others, like courage, 
hero, which rhyme only with words that cannot be used in serious 
poetry ; others again which have but a single consonance, as babe, 
astrolabe, length, strength. Our poverty of rhyme is perhaps 
the greatest formal difficulty in English poetical composition. 
In the infancy of our literature, it was felt by Chaucer, who con- 
cludes the Complaint of Mars and Yenus with this lamentation : 

And eke to me it is a great penaunce, 

Sith rime in English hath soch scarcite, 

To folow word by word the curiosite, 

Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce. 

The successors of Chaucer have felt the burden of the embarrass- 
ment, if they have not echoed the complaint. 

Walker's Rhyming Dictionary contains about thirty thousand 
words, including the different inflected forms of the same word. ■ 
In this list the number of different endings is not less than four- 
teen or fifteen thousand, and inasmuch as there are in the same 
list five or six thousand words or endings without rhyme, as I 
have already stated, there remain about nine thousand rhymed 
endings to twenty-five thousand words, so that the average num- 
ber of words to an ending, or, which comes to the same thing, 
the number of rhymes to the words capable of rhyming, would 
be less than three. The Rhyming Dictionary indeed contains 
scarcely half the English words admissible in poetry, and of 
those that form its vocabulary, many are wholly un-English and 
unauthorized, but there is no reason to suppose that the propor- 
tions would be changed by extending the list. 

If we compare our own with some of the Romance languages, 



Lect. xxni.] ' EHYMES IN SPANISH AND ITALIAN. 431 

we shall find a surprising difference in the relative abundance 
and scarcity of rhymes. 

The Spanish poet Yriarte, in a note to his poem La Musica, 
states the number of endings in that language at three thousand 
nine hundred only, among which are a large number that occur 
only in a single word. Now as the Spanish vocabulary is a 
copious one, we shall be safe in saying that there are probably 
more than thirty thousand Spanish words capable of being em- 
ployed in poetry. The inflections are very numerous, and while 
our verb love admits of but seven forms, namely, love, loves, 
lovest, loveth, lovedest, loving, and loved, the corresponding Span- 
ish verb amar has more than fifty. Nouns distinguish the 
numbers ; pronouns and adjectives generally, and articles always, 
both genders and numbers, and we may assume that the words, 
upon an average, admit of at least three forms. This would give 
about one hundred thousand forms with less than four thousand 
endings, or twenty-five rhymes to every word. This is but a 
rough estimate, and it must be observed that, from the strictness 
of the laws of Castilian prosody, as compared with the Italian, 
many rhymes, which Tasso would have used without scruple, 
would be disapproved in Spanish, except in ballads and other 
popular poetry. "Words of the same class, whose consonance de- 
pends wholly on grammatical ending, are sparingly coupled, and 
absolute coincidence of sound is disallowed, as in most other 
languages. Hence, while am aba and call aba would be re- 
garded as a license, h al 1 a b a and c a 1 1 a b a would be inadmissi- 
ble. For this reason, and because also the article and other un- 
important words cannot well be used at the end of a verse, the 
number of Spanish rhymes available in practice is considerably 
less than the calculation I have just given would make it. 

I am inclined to believe that the endings are more numerous, 
and consequently the rhymes fewer, in Italian than in Spanish, 
although still very abundant as compared with the poverty of 
English consonances ; and this may explain the greater freedom 
of the Italian poets in the use of them.* Tasso even employs 



* Rosasco, Bimario Toscano, Padova, 1763, gives the number of Italian end- 
ings at 5,042. The list of unrhymed words contains 500, each capable of two 
forms. 



432 ITALIAN VERSIFICATION. • [Lect. xxin. 

identical rhymes almost as liberally as Gower ; and in the second 
canto of the Gerusalemme Liberata I find the following pairs : 
Yiene eonviene, face verb and face noun, voti devo- 
ti, immago mago, impone appone, irresolute so- 
lute, riveli veli, esecutrice vendicatrice, volto 
participle and volto noun, spiri sospiri, lamenti ram- 
menti tormenti, sole console, compiacque pi- 
a c qu e , and nearly twenty more equally objectionable on the score 
of too perfect consonance. 

Poverty in rhyme is one of the reasons why the talent of im- 
provisation, so common and so astonishingly developed in degree 
in Italy, is almost unknown in England and among ourselves.* 
Besides the ease of rhyming, the general flexibility of the Italian 
language, and its great freedom of syntactical movement as com- 
pared with the rigidity of most other European tongues, adapt it 
to the rhythmical structure of verse as remarkably as the abundance 
of similar inflectional endings f acilitates the search for rhymes. 
It is this quality of flexibility of arrangement which gives it so 
great an advantage over the Spanish in ease of versification, not- 
withstanding the greater number of like terminations in the latter. 
The structure of the Spanish period, whether in poetry or in 

* To those who have not witnessed the readiness and dexterity of Italian 
improvisatori, their performances are incredible, and they are perhaps even 
more inexplicable to those who have listened to them. The following is an in- 
stance which fell under my own observation : An eminent improvisatore, in 
spending an evening in a private circle, was invited to give some specimens of' 
his art. He composed and declaimed several short poems on subjects suggest- 
ed by us, with scarcely a moment's preparation. They were in a great variety 
of metres, and very often accommodated to louts rimes, or blank rhymes, fur- 
nished by the party, and purposely made as disparate as possible. In one in- 
stance, he communicated to me privately the general scope of thought to be 
woven into a sonnet, and proposed that the party should furnish the blank 
rhymes, a subject, and two lines from any Italian poet which might occur to us. 
He was then to accommodate the proposed train of thought to the rhymes and 
the subject, and to introduce the two verses which should be suggested. The 
rhymes were prepared, and the subject given was the Penknife. I remember 
but one of the lines which he was required to interweave. It was, 

Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella ! 
(Depart in peace, fair and blessed soul !) 

The sonnet, really a very spirited one, was composed and ready for delivery 
in less time than we had spent in collecting and arranging the rhymes. 



Lect. xxiii.] ANCIENT VEESIFICATIO^. 433 

prose, is comparatively cumbrous and formal ; there are fewer 
dactylic feet, and less variety of accentuation ; and hence it does 
not so readily accommodate itself to a metrical disposition of 
words as the Italian, which has the additional convenience of 
dropping or retaining the final vowel in many cases at pleasure. 

It has been thought singular that with the multitude of like 
terminations, and the great sensibility of the Greek and Latin ear, 
neither rhyme, alliteration, nor accent should have become a met- 
rical element of versification, but that, on the contrary, repetition 
of sound in all its forms should have been sedulously avoided. 
But the very abundance of similar endings suggests the reason 
why they were not used as a formal ingredient in the structure of 
verse. That which constantly forces itself upon us we do not 
seek after, but rather aim to avoid. It would, therefore, have 
been a departure from the principles of a taste so fastidious as 
that of the classic ages, artificially to multiply and emphasize co- 
incidences of sound which, by the laws of the language, were 
continually presenting themselves unsolicited. The frequent re- 
currence of like sounds in those languages was unavoidable : it 
was a grammatical necessity, and if such sounds had been design- 
edly introduced as rhymes, and thus made still more conspicuous, 
they could not but have been as offensive to the delicacy of an- 
cient ears as excessive alliteration is to our own. To them such 
obvious coincidences appeared too gross to be regarded as proper 
instrumentalities in so ethereal an art as poetry, and they con- 
structed a prosody depending simply upon the subtilest element 
of articulation, the quantity or relative length of the vowels. 

The fastidiousness of taste increases with its refinement, and 
indeed, in many cases, the one is but another name for the other. 
When the poetic forms of classic Greece and Rome became more 
multifarious, and the rules of prosody and metrical structure 
more and more distinctly defined, we observe greater care in the 
avoidance, not merely of end-rhymes, but of all repetitions of 
sound, both in poetry and prose. There are some traces of the 
employment of rhyme and assonance in mere popular literature 
at a very remote period ; and though none of the great poets of 
antiquity are supposed to have intentionally introduced either, 
yet their comparatively frequent occurrence in the works of 
Hesiod seems to show that in his time no very great pains were 
19 



434 REPETITION OF SOUNDS. [Lect. xxm. 

taken to exclude them. The extant works of Hesiod comprise 
about twenty-three hundred lines or verses, and I find in these 
poems thirty pairs of consecutive rhymes, and about twenty in- 
stances' where the same termination occurs with one or two inter- 
vening verses. In twice that number of verses in the Iliad and 
the Odyssey, I observe but twenty pairs of consecutive rhymes, 
generally repetitions of the same words, and about thirty recur- 
rences of rhymes separated by one or two hues. The difference 
between the two poets is not likely to have been accidental, and 
it is not improbable that the more numerous critical revisions 
which the works of Homer passed through, eliminated some in- 
stances of what to the Greek ear was offensive. The rhymes in 
Hesiod in many cases occur in catalogues of proper names, and 
it is possible that they were designedly employed as helps to the 
memory, which would be more needed in a mere list of names 
than in a connected narrative. It should be observed with refer- 
ence to both Hesiod and Homer, that the ancient accentuation in 
many instances doubtless made the rhymes much less conspicuous 
to the ear than they are by the modern modes of scanning, but 
still they could hardly have failed to be noticed. 

The ancients in general avoided resemblances of sound in prose 
with almost equal solicitude, though they were perhaps even less 
scrupulous with regard to the repetition of the same word than 
we are in English ; but there are passages in some of the more 
primitive prose writers where coincidence of syllable seems almost 
sought for. There is an example of this in Herodotus, familiar 
to every school-boy : 

rolai irapa aflac ycvofievoioi KpoKoSiclotai to'lgl ev ryot dcjuaaiyai. 

The monotony of this passage must have struck every ear, and 
if, as some suppose, the ancient Greeks, like the modern, pro- 
nounced the diphthong 01 like i or our long e, the effect of so 
many repetitions must have been still more disagreeable. It 
would seem, then, that in the less artificial periods of Greek 
literature, coincidence of sound, in poetry and prose, if unsought 
for, was yet not very scrupulously avoided, and the systematic 
rejection of it is one of the refinements of a later age. There 
are, however, many instances where fastidious Greek and Latin 
writers of the most polished ages of ancient literature have, in- 



Lect. xxm.] KEPETITION OF SOUNDS. 435 

tentionally or unintentionally, admitted more or less perfect con- 
sonances and repetitions of sound.* Ovid has many rhyming 
couplets, and Cicero says in prose, "belhim autem itasuscipi- 
a t u r ut nihil aliud nisi pax qusesita videatur." Landor notes 
that the great orator in one of his moral treatises uses the verb 
p o s s u m in some of its forms seven times in fourteen lines. The 
same critical triner has spent some of his many hours of labori- 
ous idleness in hunting up cacophonies of various sorts in Plato, 
to whom he seems to owe a particular grudge ; but, nevertheless, 
it was certainly a rule of both Greek and Latin composition, that 
all coincidences of sound, except those of quantity in verse, were 
to be avoided. 

Notwithstanding the modern love of consonance, we in gen- 
eral abstain from it where it is not essential to the form of com- 
position employed, and a rhyming couplet in blank verse, except 
occasionally at the end of a paragraph in dramatic or dithyrambic 
poetry, is felt at once as an unwarrantable license. Rhyme 

* Mullach, Q-rammatik der GriechiscJien Vulgar spraclie, p. 78, cites a passage 
of rhymed prose from Plato, Symp. p. 197, D., irpdo rrjra /iev iro l A'C,o)v, aypidrrjra 
tf U-opiZav, etc., through several pairs of consonances, and two couplets of 
rhymed verse from a speech of Strepsiades in the Clouds of Aristophanes, 
707. Cicero, Tusc. Disp., I. 28, and III. 19, quotes rhyming verses from 
Ennius ; but the rule of Quintilian, whom Roger Ascham triumphantly ap- 
peals to in the Scholemaster, is express in its condemnation of like endings — 
similiter desinentia. See Quint. IX. c. 4. See also Fuch, IIL ter 
Abschnit. 

In the literature of the Middle Ages, we sometimes meet with rhymes in 
prose, in works where we should least expect to find them. Thus, in the 
Saxon Chronicle, MLXXXVII., p. 296, Ingram's edition, there is a long pas- 
sage with a great number of rhyming words at irregular intervals. 

The Old French Books of the Kings are full of passages where the fre- 
quent rhymes must have been intentional. Thus, p. 5: "Del present out 
primes Deus sa part, puis al evesche fist bel reguard. Et si li dist : Sire, sire, 
entend & mei; jo sui la tue ancele ki ja" devant tei preieres fis, E pur cest 
enfant dune Deu requis; il me le dunad a" sun plaisir, et je li rend pur lui 
servir." P. 7, "Par pri, par force, les dames violerent ; le pople del sacrifise 
tresturnerent. Del sacrifise pristrent a" sei, par rustie et par desrei, plus que n'en 
out cumanded la lei." P. 8, " Vostre fame n'est mie seine, kar a mal le pople 
meine ; ne f aites mais tel uverainne, dunt le sacrifise remaigne. Si horn peche 
vers altre, a Deu se purrad acorder, e s' il peche vers Deu ki purrad pur lui 
preier f tant tendrement les f ols ama que reddement ne's chastia ; par bel les 
reprist e par amur, nient par destrece ne par reddur, cume apent a maistre e 
a pastur." 



436 ANCIENT POETS CHANTED. [Lect. xxin 

strides us no less disagreeably, if it happens to occur between 
two emphatic words in prose, as does also a metrical structure, 
which, unless it is wholly accidental, has much the same effect as 
a dancing step in the walk of a reverend senior. Those who are 
acquainted with the admirably told German tales of Musseus, 
will remember the comic, mock-heroic air thrown over the nar- 
rative by the occasional introduction of a succession of iambics, 
and our newspapers often contain prose articles rendered equally 
ludicrous' by interspersing rhyming words now and then. There 
are indeed instances in rhetoric, both ancient and modern, of the 
happy employment of like sounds, but the attempt to introduce 
them artificially into oratory, generally serves no other purpose 
than to exemplify the proverb, and to prove experimentally that 
" there is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous." It is 
remarkable that neither the fine ear of Fisher Ames, nor the 
taste of his dignified audience, was offended by the repetitions of 
sound in a passage of his celebrated speech on the British Treaty : 
" This day we under take to render account to the widows and 
orphans whom our decision will make / to the wretches that will 
be roasted at the stake ; to our country, &c, &c." Here, of 
course, the consonance could not have been other than an acci- 
dental one, but it does not appear to have been noticed as a 
blemish, though in general such coincidences are peculiarly dis- 
agreeable. The Spanish ear is so nice on this point, according 
to an eminent writer of that nation, that the asonante, or imper- 
fect rhyme, where the vowels are the same, with different con- 
sonants, as fame, state, make, cane, though it is employed as an 
element of verse in certain poetic forms, is offensive in prose, if 
the asonantes happen to terminate two or three phrases or mem- 
bers of a period in near succession.* 

There is perhaps a further reason why coincidence of sound 
should have been unsought on the one hand, and disregarded on 
the other, if it chanced to occur in Greek poetry. The bardic 
lays of ancient Greece were probably not committed to writing, 
and they were chanted or sung at entertainments, public or pri- 



* Aim en la prosa les of ende el mero asonante quaudo se halla en palabras 
que terminan el sentido de f rases poco distantes unas de otras. — Yriarte, notes 
to la Miisica. 



Lect. xxiii.] ORIGIN OF RHYME. 437 

rate. Now, though persons taught the modern school-boy sing- 
song way of reading poetry strongly emphasize the rhyme, yet in 
singing, or in modulated recitation, we scarcely observe it when it 
occurs, or miss it when it does not. We cannot indeed positively 
say that a like difference existed between ancient reading and 
chanting, but it is not violently improbable that when the Theog- 
ony or the Works and Days of Hesiod were sung by the author 
or his successors, his rhymes may have passed unnoticed; and 
with respect to Homer, whose immortal poems were handed down 
from age to age by oral delivery and transmission, it may be sup- 
posed, as already hinted, that when they were written down, and 
edited, as we know they were, by a long succession of copyists 
and scholiasts, original peculiarities, now felt to be unpleasant de- 
partures from the received canons of poetry, were struck out. 

To discuss the historical origin of rhyming versification would 
lead me too far from my subject. The word rhyme is not de- 
rived from the Grseco-Latin r h y t h m u s . It is of original Gothic 
stock, and ought to cast off the Greek garb, in which the pedantic 
affectation of classical partialities, and the desire to help the theory 
that ascribes to the thing, as well as to the name, a Latin origin, 
have dressed it. The proper spelling is simply rime, and though 
rhyming cannot be shown to have been practised among the 
Gothic tribes earlier than elsewhere in Europe and the East, yet 
it probably sprung up among them spontaneously, as a natural 
poetical form of the language, just as it did among some of the 
Oriental nations. In any event, the current supposition that its 
first invention belongs to the monkish poetry of the middle ages, 
and that other modern theory which traces it to the Celtic bards, 
rest alike on a very insufficient foundation. But whether it was 
indigenous to the Gothic nations or not, it fell in so naturally 
with, the love of alliteration and other coincidence of sound which 
characterizes all the branches of that great family, that it found 
ready acceptance among them as soon as models of rhyming ver- 
sification were presented to them. 

The passionate admirers of classical literature in the sixteenth 
century stoutly opposed the employment of rhyme, as a barba- 
rous innovation on the consecrated forms of the art. Koger 
Ascham says, that Cheke and Watson held our " rude beggarly 
rhyming to have been first brought into Italy by Gothes and 



438 BEN JONSOIST ON EHYME. [Lect. xxni. 

Hunnes," and that to " follow rather the Gothes in rhyming than 
the Greekes in trew versifying, were even to eate acornes with 
swyne, when we may freely eate wheate bread amonges men." 
Sir Philip Sidney complains of contemporaneous English poetry 
that " one verse did bnt beget another "; and so the whole be- 
came " a confused masse of words with a tinkling sound of ryme 
barely accompanied with reason." * But this is probably to be re- 
garded less as a censure of the use than of the abuse of rhyme, 
for though he himself composed in almost all known ancient me- 
tres, yet he wrote by preference in rhymed verse, and used double, 
triple, and compounded rhymes with great freedom. He more- 
over formally defends rhyme in the following passage : 

" Eow of versifying there are two sorts, the one ancient, the 
other moderne : the ancient marked the quantitie of each sylla- 
ble, and according to that framed his verse : the moderne observ- 
ing only number, with some regard of the accent, the chief life 
of it standeth in that like sounding of the words, which we call 
ryme. Whether of these be the more excellent, would beare 
many speeches, the ancient, no doubt, more fit for musicke, 
both words and time observing quantity, and more fit lively to 
expresse divers passions, by the low or lofty sound of the well- 
weighed syllable. The latter likewise with his ryme striketh a 
certain musicke to the ear, and in fine, since it doth delight, 
though by another way, it obtaineth the same purpose, there be- 
ing in either sweetnesse, and wanting in neither, Majestie, and 
truly the English, before any vulgar language I know, is fit for 
both sorts." 

Ben Jonson's opinion of rhyming verse was more unfavorable, 
and he thus expresses his dislike of it : 

Rime, the rack of finest wits, 
That expresseth but by fits, 

True conceits, 
Spoiling senses of their treasure, 
Cosening judgment with a measure, 

But false weight, 

Wresting words from their true calling, 
Propping verse for fear of falling 
To the ground, 

* Defence of Poesie, ninth edition, p. 561. 



Lect. xxm.] MILTON OE" RHYME. 439 

Joining syllables, drowning letters, 
Fasting vowels, as with fetters, 
They were hound. 

He that first invented thee, 
May his joints tormented be, 

Cramp'd forever ! 
Still may syllables jarre with time, 
Still may reason warre with rime 

Resting never, &c, &c. 

Milton condemns rhyme as "the Invention of a barbarous 
Age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre ; grac't indeed 
since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by 
custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and con- 
straint, to express many things otherwise and for the most part 
worse then else they would have exprest them ***** a thing 
of itself to all judicious eares triveal and of no true musical de- 
light"; and he congratulates himself on having in Paradise Lost 
set the first example in English epic of avoiding " the jingling 
sound of like endings," and thus restored " to Heroic Poem an- 
cient liberty from the troublesome and modern bondage of rinie- 
ing." 

It can hardly be said that Milton's experiment was a successful 
one, for the slowness with which his great poem won its way to 
public favor is doubtless in some measure to be ascribed to its re- 
jection of what the English ear demanded as an essential constitu- 
ent of the poetic form. Milton has had many imitators, but 
blank verse has as yet established itself as a legitimate mode of 
English versification only in the heroic metre. The final rejec- 
tion of rhyme from the metrical system of our language is as im- 
probable, indeed as impossible we may say, as the abandonment 
of accentual rhythm and the return to prosodical quantity. 

Until the seventeenth century, the ear of modern Europe was 
so little wearied with rhyme, that in spite of the protestations of the 
classical school, it fairly revelled in this new element of metrical 
sweetness. The same rhyme was often carried through a great 
number of verses, and in many poems all the stanzas have the 
same set of terminations, a sufficient variety to satisfy the taste of 
the times being obtained by differently arranging the rhymes in 
consecutive stanzas. Satiety at last produced a reaction which 



440 PKEDOMINANCE OF EHYME. [Lect. xxm. 

concurred with other influences in restricting the nse of like end- 
ings, and we often meet with evidences of a disposition to avoid 
the nse of repetitions of sound in prose. Thus, the Germans say 
A u f - und N i e d e r gang for A u f g a n g und N i e d e r - 
gang, the Spaniards facil-y subitamente for facil- 
mente y subitamente, and we fair- and softly, for fairly 
and softly* The Tuscan canzone, in which the consonances are 
" few and far between," shows that even the rhyme-loving Italian 
feels the necessity of making the recurrence of this ornament less 
frequent, and its regularity less palpable, in the highest order of 
lyric poetry, than in lighter compositions. The modern license 
in the use of rhymes has grown, in great measure, out of a weari- 
ness of perpetual repetition, but it is partly founded on the ex- 
ample of earlier poets, who are mistakenly supposed often to have 
used imperfect rhymes, when in fact, in the orthoepy of their 
times, the consonance was complete. 

The articulation, and, consequently, the prosody of languages, 
are much affected by the character of their grammatical inflec- 
tions. Where inflections exist, the syntactical relations of the 
words and the intelligibility of the period depend upon them, and 
they must consequently be pronounced with a certain distinctness. 
The orthoepy of most languages inclines to make the inflectional 
element conspicuous. If it consists in the addition of syllables 
to the radical, then a principal, or at least a secondary accent will 
fall upon some of the variable syllables. The vowels, though 
few in number, will be of frequent occurrence, distinct in articu- 
lation, and well discriminated from each other. The consonants 
will be clear and detached in their pronunciation. If inflection 
is made by vowel-change, the vowels will be numerous and 
subtilely distinguished, and the consonants, though more numer- 
ous, will become relatively less prominent. Examples of this 
may be found on the one hand in the small number of vowel- 
sounds and the clear, staccato articulation of the consonants in 
Italian and Spanish, and on the other in the obscurity of the con- 
sonants, and the multiplied shades of vowel- sound in the Danish. 
So long as the predominant mode of inflection in English was by 
the letter-change, the attention was constantly drawn to the essen- 

* D'Esclot, CLXYIII., has complidameni e devota. 



Lect. xxiii.] POETIC LICENSES. 441 

tial quality of the vowel, and even a slight difference in this re- 
spect struck the ear more forcibly than at present, when inflection 
by terminal augment is so common. Hence, a departure from 
the law of strict consonance was much less likely to be tolerated, 
and I am persuaded that the number of imperfect rhymes in old 
English authors will be found to be constantly fewer as we ad- 
vance in the knowledge of their orthoepy. 

After the introduction of Norman words, with their augmen- 
tative inflections, the system of letter-change fell into great con- 
fusion, and all well-grounded principle of declension and conju- 
gation seems to have been lost sight of. The derangement of the 
strong inflections continued for centuries, and the poets took ad- 
vantage of this to vary the characteristic vowel in almost any way 
that suited the convenience of their rhymes. Guest sneers at the 
ignorance of those who suppose that Spenser's licenses in this re- 
spect were unauthorized innovations of his own, but I cannot as- 
sent to this view of the subject. For though Spenser may have 
found in ballads and other popular literature precedents for most 
of his inflectional extravagances, yet some of them, at least, were 
violations of the analogies of the language, and without the sanc- 
tion of any really authoritative example. But the licenses of Spen- 
ser were by no means limited to anomalous vowel-changes, for he 
abbreviated or elongated words for the sake of rhythm or conso- 
nance as unscrupulously as he substituted an open vowel for a 
close, or the contrary. We have already seen that he loosely re- 
solved the diphthongal i into its elements, and made like a dis- 
syllable rhyming with seek, and with equal boldness he cuts down 
cherish to cherry, that he may pair it off with merry, exnbathe to 
embay, for the sake of a rhyme to away, and converts contrary 
into a verb by dropping the final vowel ; on the other hand he 
lengthens nobless into nobleless, and dazzled into dazzeled. 
Thomas Heywood uses double and triple rhymes with much 
grace and dexterity, and it is the more remarkable that so expert 
a versifier should have allowed himself to disguise so important a 
word as Deity for the sake of a consonance : 

By the reflex of Iustice and true Piety, 
It drawes to contemplation of a Diety. 

This, however, is but a tame license compared to that by which, in 

19* 



442 EEPETITIO]^" OF EHYMES. [Lect. xxiii. 

the third book of the Hierarchie, he reduces the goodly polysyl- 
lable intoxicated to the humble form Hoxt* But Hey wood, like 
many old English writers, was of opinion that man is the lord, 
not the slave of language, and he often proved a hard master to 
the words that served him. 

The great number of English words which are incapable of 
rhyme, and the few which agree in any one of our numerous 
endings, reduce the poet to a very limited variety of choice, and 
there are many pairs of words which are found as invariably to- 
gether as length and strength, oreath and death, or wealth and 
stealth. When you see jollity at the end of a line, you do not 
need your eyes to tell you ih&tfrwolity cannot be far off; moun- 
tains and fountains are as indissolubly united in rhyme as they 
are in physical geography, and if a poet qualifies an object as 
frigid, he never fails to inform you in the next line that it is also 
rigid. 

The consequence of this perpetual repetition is a weariness of 
all exactness in rhymes, and a tendency to great license in the use 
of imperfect consonances. The proper relief is to be found, not 
in a self-indulgent laxity, a repudiation of the fetters of verse, 
but in a bold return to the poetical wealth, both of form and sub- 
stance, of our ancient tongue; and the certainty that we shall 
there find unexhausted, though long neglected, mines of ores and 
gems, should be, for poetic natures, an argument of no small force 
for the study of primitive English. 

There are, in both the Gothic and the Romance languages, 
equivalents or substitutes for rhyme, some of which have not 
been employed at all, others not systematically, in English poetry. 
The introduction of them well deserves inquiry, and the charac- 
ter of these devices, and the possibility of their restoration as 
metrical elements, will be considered and illustrated in other lec- 
tures. 

* On the same page (edition of 1635, p. 134) there is a catachresis in the em- 
ployment of indenturing, which makes it very enigmatical to all readers except 
those who know how legal indentures were anciently drawn up and cut apart. 



LECTURE XXIY. 

ACCENTUATION AND DOUBLE RHYMES. 

The modes of consonance which may be, and by different 
nations have been, employed as essential elements of the poetical 
form, are very various. The prosody or metrical system of the 
classical languages is founded on quantity, that of modern litera- 
ture on accentuation. Each system necessarily excludes the 
characteristic element of the other, not indeed from accidental 
coincidence, or altogether, from consideration in practice, but 
from theoretical importance as an ingredient in poetic measure. 
Quantity, as employed by the ancients, has been generally sup- 
posed to consist simply in the length or relative duration of dif- 
ferent syllables in time of utterance.* To us, mere quantity is 
so inappreciable, that we cannot comprehend how it could be 
made the basis of a metrical system. It is difficult to believe 
that, with any supposable sensibility of ear to the flow of time, a 
prosody could have been founded on that single accident of sound, 

* The terms long and short, employed in popular English orthoepy, are 
usually wholly misapplied. Most of our vowels have two long sounds, and 
the corresponding short sounds are often expressed not by the same, but by 
different letters. The propriety of the terms long and short, as truly descrip- 
tive appellations, expressive, simply, of relative duration in time, is, to say the 
least, very questionable, even when applied to cases where the same character 
is employed for both. It is not true that short sounds, simply by a more 
leisurely utterance, necessarily pass into long ones, and vice versa, for if so, 
the short vowels of a slow delivery would be the long ones of a rapid pronun- 
ciation, which is by no means the fact. An attentive examination of the posi- 
tion of the organs of speech will show that between longs and shorts there is, 
generally at least, a difference in quality as well as in time. Syllables long by 
position, indeed, require more time for their utterance than ordinary short syl- 
lables, because they contain a greater number of successive articulations ; but 
here, in modern orthoepy, the length is a property of the syllable, not of the 
vowel alone. How far, and in what way, position actually modified the pro- 
nunciation of the vowel itself, in ancient prosody, cannot now be determined, 
and of course we do not know whether in that case prosodical length belonged 
to the wioel, more or less, than in modern articulation. 

(443) 



444 ANCIENT METRES. [Lect. xxiv. 

and we cannot resist the persuasion that there entered into ancient 
prosody some jet undiscovered element, some peculiarity of artic- 
ulation or intonation, that was as influential as the mere temporal 
length of vowels in giving a rhythmical character to a succession 
of syllables which, with the supposed ancient accentuation, is, to 
our ears, undistinguishable from prose. 

Although, for want of appropriate native terms, we employ 
Latin and Greek designations of feet and measures, yet our mod- 
ern accentual rhythm is in no sense an equivalent of the ancient 
temporal prosody, as it has sometimes been considered, but it is 
its representative, and, like some other representatives, very far 
from being a truthful expression of the primary constituency for 
which it answers. It is for this reason that every attempt to 
naturalize the classical metres in English verse, except in the very 
disputable case of the hexameter, has proved a palpable failure, 
and is in fact a delusion, because, from the want of parity between 
accent and quantity, they cannot strike the ear alike, and there- 
fore the eye alone, or the fingers which count off the feet, can 
find any resemblance between the ancient metre and the modern. 
Indeed, what we imitate is not the original, but a figment which 
we have fabricated and set up in the place of it. 

Simmias of Rhodes, and other half-forgotten ancient triflers, 
wrote short pieces in verses of different lengths, arranged in such 
succession that, when written down, the poem presented to the 
eye the form of an egg, an altar, a two-bladed battle-axe, or a 
pair of wings, and the likeness here was as real between the poem 
and the object, as it is between modern and ancient hexameters 
or Horatian metres. 

The frequent coincidence between Latin prosodical quantity 
and the Italian accent in the same words, and other points of 
apparent similarity in articulation, authorize the belief that in 
sound, these two languages resemble each other more nearly than 
any other pair of ancient and modern tongues, and of course, if 
ancient metres were capable of reproduction anywhere, it should 
be in Italy. Nevertheless, the attempt has hardly been made, 
except by way of experiment, and then with no such results as 
to encourage repetition.* What we call ancient metres have 



* The Latin metres were fashioned upon, and borrowed from, those of the 



Lect. xxtv.] ANCIENT metees. 445 

proved best adapted to languages whose articulation differs most 
widely from that of the classic tongues, and the success of these 
metres has been in the inverse ratio of their actual resemblance 
to the prosody from which they have taken their names. The 
more explosive the accentuation, the more numerous the conso- 
nants ; the less clear and pure the vowel, the more tolerable the 
modern travesty of the ancient metre : and the hexameter has 
become naturalized in Germany, not because it is like, but be- 
cause it is unlike, the classical verse whose name it bears, and 
therefore is suited to a language of a totally different orthoepical 
character.* The pentameter has also, but invitd Minerva, been 



Greeks, and the copy may be supposed to have been, in its essential features, 
closely conformable to the original ; but it is a remarkable fact, that in the 
pronunciation of the two languages which now represent the Greek and the 
Latin, there is a difference that seems to point to a corresponding distinction 
in the orthoepy of the ancient mother tcngues. In Italian, not uniformly, 
certainly, but in the great majority of cases, the accent, or stress of voice, 
falls on the syllable which, in the corresponding Latin word, was prosodically 
long. In modern Greek, on the other hand, no such coincidence between the 
present accent and the ancient quantity exists, and the accentuation is absolutely 
independent of the ancient metrical value of the syllables in the same words. 
Hence, though modern Italian poetry has assumed a new character by the 
adoption of new metres, and especially by the fetters of rhyme, yet there is 
very possibly some resemblance between the rhythms of modern and ancient 
Roman bards, whereas modern Greek measures, which are accentual and not 
temporal, and the prosodical movement of ancient Hellenic poetry, seem to 
have nothing in common. The partial resemblance between the old Latin 
quantity and the new Italian accentuation is one of the circumstances that 
serve to explain why, even after the introduction of modern rhymes and 
modern measures into Latin poetry, the classical metres were also kept up in 
mediaeval Latin, and both systems of prosody employed concurrently. It is 
true, that even after the first appearance of the accentual, or as the most im- 
portant early form of it is called, the political metre of modern Greek, hexam- 
eters and other verses constructed after the ancient rules sometimes occur, 
but the co-existence of the two systems was much less general, and of briefer 
duration, in Greece than in Italy. 

* The greater proportion of unaccented syllables in German, renders that 
language better suited to the classical, and especially the dactylic, measures 
than the English. A literal translation from English into German occupies 
from a third to a fourth more space in letterpress in the latter than in the 
former. The number of words, from the resemblance between the two in 
syntactical movement, is about equal in a given period, and the accents do 
not differ much in frequency. The syllables in German contain, upon an 
average, more letters than in English, but the differenee in this respect is not 



446 ANCIENT METEES. [Lect. xxrv. 

introduced into German, and the use of this most disagreeable 
and nnmelodious of measures has, for an un-Germanic ear at 
least, spoiled what would otherwise be some of the finest poems 
in all the literature.* 

sufficient to account for the difference in the space occupied by the original, 
and by a version from one to the other. It is occasioned chiefly by the greater 
number of syllables in German, resulting from the greater proportion of 
augmentative inflections in its syntax. 

* The beauty of Schiller's Spaziergang, for instance, is sadly impaired by 
the halting movement of its verse, and the shock to the reader's nerves from 
the sudden earthward plunge which Pegasus makes at the end of every al- 
ternate line. If any thing were wanting to prove that ancient prosody could 
not have been accentual, sufficient evidence might be found in its admission 
of a metre which accentual scanning makes so repulsive. 

The recent experiments in the way of reviving the hexameter in English 
have certainly been much more successful than those of the sixteenth century, 
but I believe there is little disposition to attempt to resuscitate the pentameter 
in English verse. It is surprising that so exquisite an ear as that of Spenser 
could content itself with such rhythms as those of his essays in classical 
metre, and we can hardly think him serious in offering such lines as these as 
specimens : 

See yee the blindef olded pretie God, that feathered Archer, 
Of Louers Miseries which maketh his bloodie Game ? 

Wote ye why, his moother with a Veale hath couered his face ? 
Trust me, least he my Looue happely chaunce to beholde. 

Spenser had as much difficulty in theory as in practice in reconciling accen- 
tual rhythm with classic quantity. "The accente," he says, in his letter to 
Harvey in Haslewood's collection, " sometime gapeth, and as it were yawneth 
ill-favouredly, coming shorte of that it should, and sometime exceeding the 
measure of the Number, as in Carpenter, the middle sillable being vsed shorte 
in speache, when it shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling, 
that draweth one legge after hir ; and Heauen, being vsed shorte as one silla- 
ble, when it is in verse, stretched out with a Diastole, is like a lame Dogge 
that holdes up one legge." 

Among all the various attempts to present an ancient poem to modern read- 
ers in a form supposed to be analogous to its ancient shape, I know of none 
where the success is more doubtful than in Newman's Homer. The ' ' blind 
old man of Scio's rocky isle " is reported to have earned a precarious liveli- 
hood by chanting, on festive occasions, the ballads which Pisistratus long 
after collected and arranged in the form in which we now possess them, as a 
consecutive series of poems. Mr. Newman has attempted to give them, in an 
English version, a form corresponding to that in which they were originally 
composed and delivered. I am not disposed to question the spirit or fidelity 
of this translation, and upon European ears, which are, of course, less fa- 
miliar than ours with our national serio-comic melody, the metre may not 



Lect. XXIV.] 



THE OKMULUM. 



447 



The poetic measures of the Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian 
tongues are founded wholly on accentual rhythm, though the 
most ancient Gothic verses are by no means always capable of 
resolution into poetic feet. 

The Ormulum, in many respects one of the most interesting 



produce a ludicrous effect ; but to an American it has altogether the air of an 
attempt to set the Iliad to the tune of Yankee Doodle. The following are 
specimens : 



1. Maiden Athene thereupon 

Courage bestow'd and enterprise, 
Might in pre-eminence be seen 
About his helmet and his shield 
In fashion of autumnal star, 
Blazeth abroad irradiant, 
Such fire around his head she then 
And uro-'d him to the midmost ranks, 



521 

on Diomed Tydides 
that he mid all the Argives 
and earn excelling glory, 
unweary fire she kindled, 
which, when in ocean washed, 
beyond the host of heaven ; 
and down his shoulders kindled, 
where'er the rout was thickest. 



Thick as the flakes of snow may fall 
When Jove the Counsellor is bent 
Snowing on mortals : mid the lull 
Until the lofty mountain-peaks 
And eke the lotus-bearing plains 
Yea, and along the hoary brine 
Save where the billows washing up 
Are all things over-wrapt, whene'er 

So with a loud crash down he dropt, 

His hair, that with the Graces vied, 

And ample tresses, which with gold 

As when in solitary dell, 

A man may kindly rear a shoot 

Dainty and all-luxuriant ; 

From diverse-blowing winds ; and it 

But sudden cometh wind indeed, 

And from its own pit wrencheth it, 

Such then the ashen-speared son 

Beneath Atrides Menelas 



upon a day of winter, 
his weapons to exhibit, 
of winds he sheds it constant, 
and outmost knolls it cover, 
and the fat tilth of peasants ; 
the shores and creeks it lineth, 
repel it ; but beyond them 
the storm from Jove is heavy. 

and o'er him clang'd his armour, 
was now with gore besprinkled, 
and silver were embraided. 
where rife spring- water bubbleth, 
of easy-sprouting olive, 
and round it breezes rustle 
with a white flower buddeth : 
with plenteous weight of tempest, 
and on the earth out-layeth. 
of Panthous, — Euphorbus, — 
was slain and stript of armour. 



The metre of Mr. Newman's translation is indeed the same as that of the 
Ormulum, which I shall have occasion to mention with praise. But it is con- 
structed with much less prosodical skill ; and while the easy, familiar flow of 
this rhythm is well adapted to the simple Saxon dialect of Ormin, with its 
multitude of liquid and vowel endings, and to the prosaic style of his narra- 
tive and discussion, nothing can be more unsuited, either to the Latinized 
diction and heavy, consonantal English of our day, or to the majestic move- 
ment and luxuriant imagery of the Homeric song. 



448 THE OEMULUM. [Lect. xxiv. 

relics of Old-Englisli poetic literature, is strictly metrical in its 
movement, and of great regularity in the structure of its verse. 
It resembles Latin poetry in adopting the principle of the elision 
of the final vowel when followed by a word beginning with a 
vowel or aspirate, and in rejecting rhyme and alliteration, while 
its rhythm is accentual, like that of all modern poetry. Waiving 
the difference between temporal and accentual rhythm, the versi- 
fication of the Ormulum closely resembles some ancient metres, 
and is therefore assumed to have been borrowed from them. I 
shall not debate the question in this particular case, but I must 
protest against the theories which assume that the pattern of all 
that is modern in literature is to be found in something that is 
old. There is a school which traces all recent forms of European 
verse, rhyme itself included, to Latin classical or mediaeval 
poetry, all Latin metrical forms to Greek, all Greek poetic meas- 
ures to Sanscrit, and here, fortunately, for want of a new literary 
continent beyond, the pedigree abruptly stops. Resemblance of 
form between different languages, or their literary adaptations, 
may prove a community of nature in man, but not necessarily a 
historical descent of one from the other, or even a relationship 
between them. Recurrence is not always repetition, and it is not 
in the slightest degree improbable that like thoughts, images, 
poetic phrases and poetic measures should originate spontaneously 
in nations and ages that have nothing in common but their in- 
nate humanity. The pride of investigation must end somewhere, 
and we may as well admit ultimate facts in man as in brute 
nature. . 

I will illustrate the prosody of the Ormulum by a moderniza- 
tion of the first twenty-two verses, in the same metre as the text, 
and I may observe that the original is so purely English in vocab- 
ulary and grammar that most of the words I employ are the 
same in form and syntactical arrangement as in the text : 

Now, brother Walter, brother mine, 

After the flesh's nature ; 
And brother mine in Christenty 

By baptism and believing ; 
And brother'in the house of God 

Eke in another manner, 
In that we-two have taken up 

One priestly rule to follow, 



Lect. xxrv.] THE OEMULUM. 449 

Both canons are in rank and life 

As holy Austin 'stablished ; 
I now have done e'en as thou badst, 

And thy desire fulfilled, 
For into English I have turned 

The Gospel's sacred teachings, 
According to the little gift 

Which God to me hath granted. 
Thou thoughtest that it might right well 

Yield Christian souls much profit, 
If English folk, for love of Christ, 

Would faithfully it study, 
And follow it, and it fulfil, 

In thought, in word, in doing.* 

* Nu, brofrerr Wallterr, bro|>err min 

Affterr |>e flaeshess kinde ; 
& broterr min Crisstenndom 

f>urrh fulluhht & fmrrh trowwf>e ; 
& broterr min i Godess hus, 

Yet o |>e |>ride wise, 
f>urrh patt witt hafenn takenn ba 

An reghellboc to f ollghenn, 
Unnderr kanunnkess had & lif , 

Swa summ Sannt Awwstin sette ; 
Ice haf e don swa summ pu badd, 

& forpedd te J>in wille, 
Ice haf e wennd inntill Ennglissh 

Goddspelless hallghe lare, 
Affterr patt little witt tatt me 

Min Drihhtin kafepp lenedd. 
pu pohhtest tatt itt mihhte wel 

Till mikell frame turrnenn, 
Yiff Ennglissh f ollk, f orr luf e off Crist, 

Itt wollde yerne lernenn, 
& follghenn itt, and fillenn itt 

Wipp |>ohht, wi|>|) word, wip|> dede. 

The metrical construction of this poem is so skilful, and its ac- 
centual rhythm so perfectly preserved, that though we are con- 
stantly expecting the rhyme, we scarcely observe that it is want- 
ing, and it seems to me one of the most dexterous compromises 
between the classical and modern prosodical systems which occur 

* For want of the proper type, I am obliged to use in this extract, as well as 
in that in Lecture xix. , sometimes y and sometimes g, where the original em- 
plays a Saxon character. 



450 NEW POETIC FOEMS. [Lect. xxiy. 

in the early poetry of any recent literature. There exists but a 
single manuscript, a mutilated fragment, of this remarkable 
poem, and there is strong reason to suppose that this is from the 
hand of the author himself. The lines are written continuously, 
like prose, but they are so marked by points as to show that they 
consist of fifteen syllables divided by a pause after the eighth, the 
first hemistich containing four iambic feet, the latter two iambics 
and an amphibrach. Theoretically, we may consider the prosody 
of the Ormulum as composed of verses of six iambics and an 
amphibrach, thus : 

And follow it and it fulfil | in thought, in word, in doing ; 

or of couplets consisting alternately of eight and seven syllabled 
lines divided into feet, like the hemistichs of the long lines, thus : 

In that we-two have taken up 
One priestly rule to follow. 

Upon the former view, the versification would be closely assimi- 
lated to that of many Latin poems of the middle ages, as well as 
to certain still earlier poetic forms, and the want of rhymes and 
of alliteration favors this theory. By the latter division, it would 
nearly resemble metres very extensively diffused through all 
modern literature, and then the difference in the length of the 
lines, and the alternate single and double endings, would be very 
noticeable and important particulars. 

The Ormulum was probably never put in circulation. The 
author hints that he was subject to the persecutions to which all 
who attempted to clothe the mysteries of religion in the vulgar 
tongue were exposed during the sway of the Romish church, and 
the mutilated condition of the manuscript may perhaps be as- 
cribed to ecclesiastical hostility. Although, therefore, there were 
other early English poems in forms partaking of the characteris- 
tics of both ancient and modern prosody, we cannot ascribe to the 
Ormulum any influence upon the structure of later English verse, 
and it stands as a unique example of greater skill in versification 
than had yet been attained in the Anglican tongue. 

The poets of the present day are striving to invent new forms 
and combinations, to emancipate themselves from some of the 
conventional restraints of verse, to loosen the fetters which they 



Lect. xxiv.] DOUBLE EHYMES. 451 

cannot wholly throw off, and to infuse fresh life and spirit into 
movements of the muses which perpetual repetition has made 
wearisome and ungraceful. As the ballet-master has revived the 
dances of the chivalric ages, and borrowed from rural districts 
and distant provinces complicated figures, giddy whirls, and bold 
saltations, so the bard has evoked from forgetfulness and obscurity 
antiquated forms, abrupt changes and quaint devices, sometimes, 
no doubt, to give appropriate expression to an inspiration which 
finds no fit utterance in the moulds of stereotyped verse, but not 
less frequently to hide poverty of thought beneath the ill-sorted 
coloring and dazzling glitter of a strange and gaudy raiment. It 
is for such reasons, good and bad, that recent poets have reintro- 
duced double and tri-syllabic rhyme, which had become nearly 
obsolete, into serious verse, and thus denationalized our poetry by 
employing an ornament for the most part foreign in both form 
and material. 

The use of double rhymes is not well suited to the Saxon con- 
stituent of our language, since the dropping of so many of the 
unaccented and less conspicuous inflections ; for double rhymes 
seldom occur in words of Saxon origin, except in the past tense 
and participle of the weak verbs and in the present participle 
with its disagreeable, unmelodious ending in -ing. Chaucer seems 
to affect monosyllabic rhymes in his verse, and indeed seldom 
employs double ones, unless we count as such words in e final, 
which perhaps we should do, for there is no doubt but this letter 
was sounded in Chaucer's time, as it is now in the cognate lan- 
guages, and in French verse. In the reign of Elizabeth, the study 
of Spanish and Italian literature led to the very frequent employ- 
ment of polysyllabic rhymes; and though not much used by 
Spenser, they continued in fashion down to the era of the Res- 
toration. At that period, French influence became predominant ; 
many, not only of the original characteristics of English litera- 
ture, but of the forms of verse which English poets had borrowed 
from the bards of Southern Europe, disappeared for a time, and 
double rhymes ceased to be used in serious compositions, until the 
necessities of the present century revived them. 

French verse, indeed, not only admits but requires the alternate 
use of double rhymes ; but as the last syllable in this case is only 
the obscure e, which is very faintly articulated, English poets felt 



452 ACCENTUATION. [Lect. xxiv. 

that a monosyllabic rhyme, with its pause, was a nearer approxi- 
mation to the French feminine rhyme, as it is called, than our 
few dissyllabic consonances, which are much more generally 
spondees than trochees, could furnish. 

I have spoken of double and triple rhymes as foreign in form 
as well as material. It is true that many, perhaps most, of the 
words forming trisyllabic or dactylic, and dissyllabic or trochaic 
rhymes, existed in the language, and were employed in poetry, 
long before the sixteenth century, but they were almost all bor- 
rowed from the French, and brought with them an accentuation 
which threw the stress of voice on the last syllable ; so that al- 
though now dactylic or trochaic in pronunciation, they originally 
furnished monosyllabic rhymes only. This position of the accent 
shows how, in Chaucer, motion and nation, company and chivalry, 
fellonie and jealous ie, abstinaunce and countenaunce, apparence 
and existence, form perfect rhymes, as they do in French at the 
present day ; and how Spenser, who employs very few double 
endings, makes Tantalus, victorious, and dolorous rhyme to each 
other. 

It is interesting to observe the gradual naturalization of the 
orthoepy of foreign words in the English tongue. Languages of 
the class to which English belongs, inflect much by letter-change. 
This change takes place in the radical, which is usually found in 
the first syllable ; and as inflections, of whatever character, must 
be distinctly pronounced and made conspicuous in order to mark 
the grammatical relations, the first syllable, or that in which the 
letter-change occurs, naturally receives the stress of voice. Hence, 
in all these languages, there is a tendency to throw the principal 
accent so far back as to reach the radical. The vocabulary of the 
French is derived, to a great extent, from Latin words deprived 
of their terminal inflections. The French adjectives mortal 
and fatal are formed from the Latin mortalis and f a t a 1 i s 
by dropping the inflected syllable ; the French nouns nation 
and condition from the Latin ablative case natione, con- 
ditione, by rejecting the e final.* In most cases, the last syl- 
lable retained in the French derivative was prosodically long in 

* Some etymologists hold the derivation of these words to be from the Latin 
accusative rather than from the ablative. 



Lect. xxiv,] ACCENT IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 453 

the Latin original, and either because it was also accented, or be- 
cause the slight accent which is perceivable in the French articu- 
lation represents temporal length, the stress of voice was laid on 
the final syllable of all these words. When we borrowed such 
words from the French, we took them with their native accentua- 
tion, and as accent is much stronger in English than in French, 
the final syllable was doubtless more forcibly enunciated in the 
former than in the latter language.* The introduction of these 
words was accordingly a disturbing element in Old-English 
orthoepy, and as the influence of this element was strengthened 
by the fact that many English words were inflected by the weak 
or augmentative method, and of course not accented on the first 
syllable, the whole accentual system of the language was deranged, 
and centuries elapsed before the radical principles of Gothic 
articulation recovered their ascendency. Words were accented 
according to their etymology, not in conformity with the genius 
of the language, and there is even yet a conflict on this very point 
between the Saxon and the Romance ingredients of our mother- 
tongue. In Chaucer's time, the words I have quoted from him 
were all accented on the last syllable ; motion, nation ; company, 
chivalry / countenaunce, abstinaunce, and this accentuation con- 
tinued without much change until the middle of the sixteenth 
century. Roger Ascham, the classical tutor of the Princess, 
afterwards Queen Elizabeth, much commends the following hex- 
ameter couplet by Mr. Thomas Watson, as being "translated 
plainlie for the sense, and roundlie for the verse ": 

All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses, 

For that lie knew many men's manners and saw many cities. 

These lines, pronounced with the modern English accentuation, 
are not hexameters, or indeed metre of any sort ; and we can scan 
them only by reading them thus : 

f Although prosodical accent is essentially a more important feature in Eng- 
lish than in French orthoepy, and therefore was always more conspicuously 
marked in the former, yet the difference in this respect does not appear to have 
been as great between the two languages three hundred years ago as at present. 
This is evident from the care and minuteness with which Palsgrave discusses 
a subject almost wholly overlooked in modern French grammars, as well as 
from other evidence 



454 CHANGE OF ACCENT. [Lect. xxiv. 

All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses, 

For that he knew many men's manners, and saw many cities.* 

The study of Italian literature, which became fashionable about 
this period, concurred with the inborn tendencies of English to 
revive the Saxon accentual system ; for the Italian verbs, nouns, 
and adjectives retain a final inflected syllable, and though that 
syllable is distinctly articulated, the stress of voice never falls 
upon the ultima, except in a very few verbs and nouns which 
have lost the Latin inflectional ending, and in cases where, for 
metrical convenience, the final vowel has been dropped. 

In Sir Philip Sidney's time, the Gothic pronunciation was 
already so far restored, that our Gallicized Latin words had taken 
a principal accent at or near the beginning ; but they still re- 
tained a secondary accent at or near the end of the word, and 
accordingly, while Chaucer made such words as nation, station, 
iambuses, or dissyllables with the accent on the last syllable, they 
had in Sidney's age become dactylic trisyllables. This is shown not 
only by the use which Sidney makes of them in poetry, but we 
have his express authority for the fact ; for in his Defense of 
Poesie, after mentioning the masculine and feminine rhymes of 
the French in one and two syllables, respectively, and the sdruc- 
c i o 1 o of the Italians, or dactyl, in three, he adds :' " The Eng- 
lish hath all three ; as do, true, [masculine ;] father, rather, 
[feminine or trochaic ;] and motion, potion" [s d r u c c i o 1 o or 
dactylic] In like manner, Puttenham says that remuneration 
makes two good dactyls, contribution a spondee and dactyl. It 
is clear, therefore, from this and much other concurrent testi- 
mony, that in the sixteenth century, mo-ti(shi)-on, p6-ti(shi)-on, 
were pronounced trisyllabically, with a faint secondary accent on 
the last syllable ; whereas at present the vowel of the final is 
obscurely articulated, the ultima and penultima have coalesced, 
and the words are dissyllabic and trochaic, or, at the end of a 
verse, spondaic. Spenser, in his Sonnet on Scanderbeg, makes 

* Harvey, in criticising Spenser's accentuation, which seems to have been 
licentious enough, inquires whether he would pronounce travelers, and pro- 
ceeds thus : "Or will Segnior Immerito bycause may happe, he hathe a fat- 
bellyed Archedeacon on his side, take vppon him to controll Maister Doctor 
Watson for his All travailers, in a verse so highly extolled of Master Ascham ? " 
— Haslewood, II., 279. Milton says character. 



Lect. xxiy.] CHANGE OF ACCENT. 455 

pyramids and heroes amphibrachs, pyramids heroes. Ben Jon- 
son accents constitute and liquefy on the last syllable.* Milton, 
in II Penseroso, rhymes throne and contemplafaVw • in the Hymn 
on the Nativity, began and ocean, alone and union, session and 
throne, misii&er able and council-table, stable and serviceable^ and 
in the Passion, tears and characters. So in Paradise Lost, he 
accents adverse, aspect, converse, access, process, impulse, pre- 
text, surface, contrite, product, prescript, and, even when em- 
ployed as nouns, consult, insult, contest. In trisyllables, blas- 
phemous, crystalline, triumphed, maritime, confldgrant. Some 
of these, such as accenting contemplation and session on the final 
syllable, are doubtless mere poetic licenses ; for Ben Jonson in 
his English Grammar says that nouns ending in -tion and -sion, 
are accented on the antepenultima, and he instances condition 
and infusion, both of which he treats as words of four syllables. 
But the great frequency of ultimate and penultimate accentuation, 
by Milton, of words in which the stress of voice is now thrown 
further back, shows that the pronunciation of the seventeenth 
more closely resembled that of the sixteenth and earlier centuries 
than of the nineteenth. 

Landor, to whom I am indebted for some of my exemplifica- 
tions from Milton, notices the superior poetic force of the Mil- 
tonic accentuation ; and he cites uproar as being a finer and 
much more striking word than our modern uproar, a pronuncia- 
tion which only serves to suggest a false etymology, uproar being 
not a compound of up and roar, but merely the English form of 
the cognate German A u f r u h r . Landor believes Wordsworth 
to have been instrumental in promoting the modern disposition 
to carry back the accent, but I think he overrates Wordsworth's 
influence in this respect. The tendency to this general change 
manifested itself a century before the time of that poet, nor have 

* In Gil's Phonographic Spelling, y and ies final are made long, as, destinj, 
victorjz, finalj, enemj, hevnlj, ivorj, skurilitj, incivilitj, miserjz, komoditj, 
which affords a strong presumption that these syllables received at least a dis- 
tinct secondary accent. 

f Puttenham (Haslewood, L, 87) says, " Sometimes it sounds better to say 
revocable than revocable, recoverable - than recoverable. " This shows that the 
accent in this termination was fluctuating, and that in revocable, it had not yet 
been carried farther back than the antepenult. 



456 CHANGE OF ACCENT. [Lect. xxiv. 

his writings ever become sufficiently popular to have awakened 
it, had it been dormant. The same critic mentions Aristocrat, 
concordance, contrary, industry, inimical, contemplate, incul- 
cate, detail, ^liexander, sonorous, mhhmary, <#<?sultory, peremp- 
tory, as words which have in very recent times transferred the 
accent to the initial syllable.* This list might have been very 
much enlarged, but the changes indicated* by Landor have not all 
become established in this country, and some of them are to be 
regretted, because they tend to obscure the etymology and clas- 
sical quantity of the words where they occur. 

There are, on the other hand, cases where the change of accent 
has brought back a word to its proper form. A striking instance 
of this sort occurs in the word hospital. This was formerly ac- 
cented on the second syllable, hospital, and in popular speech, and 
at last in writing, the initial ho was dropped and the word become 
spited, and was so spelt both in poetry and prose. This accentu- 
ation has so disguised the word that Landor believes even Ben 
Jonson to have been ignorant of its etymology, though the pas- 
sage he cites from Jonson by no means sustains the opinion. The 
strong accentuation which characterizes the English articulation 
makes us so sensible to that element of speech that we habitually 
conceive of it as a significant element of itself, and no mispronun- 
ciation of English by foreigners so effectually confounds us as the 
transposition of an accent. It has with us taken the place both 
of ancient quantity, and of the subtilty in the discrimination of 
the quality of vowels, which belongs to the cognate tongues. An 
anecdote current at our national metropolis will illustrate the im- 
portance which persons of nice ear habitually give to accentuation. 
There were, a few years since, two Senators from the Southwest, 
one of whom pronounced the name of the State they represented 
Arkansas, the other Arkansas, both of them making the accented 
syllable so emphatic, as to leave the rest of the word almost in- 
audible. The accomplished officer who then presided in the Sen- 
ate, in recognizing the Senators in question as they rose to speak, 
adopted their own accentuation, and always announced one of 

* Smart, writing in 1836, observes, that the accent in balcony has shifted 
from the second to the first syllable, within twenty years. Rogers complained 
of this displacement of accent, and said, " contemplate is bad enough, but 
balcony makes me sick." 



Lect. xxiv.] PEOSODY OF GOTHIC LANGUAGES. 457 

them as " tlie Senator from Arkansas," the other as " the Sena- 
tor from Arkansas." 

There are, indeed, examples of a transposition of the accent in 
the -contrary direction. The Latin disciple is a case in point. It 
was formerly accented on the first syllable, disciple, and in con- 
formity with this accentuation, it was sometimes spelt disjple y but 
the instances of this character are too few to be considered as any 
thing but exceptions to the well-established general tendency of 
the English speech. 

The inclination to throw back the accent, though less preva- 
lent in this country, as I shall show hereafter, is carried to an ex- 
travagant length in England, and hence such distorted pronun- 
ciations as diocesan Chry'sostom, which are not only without any 
etymological foundation, but in a high degree unmelodious and 
unrhythmical. 

The prosody of the Gothic languages, and of English more 
perhaps than any other, is much affected by the monosyllabic 
form of so many of our most important words. The short words 
in the Romance tongues are, not always, indeed, but very gener- 
ally, particles or other words usually not emphatic, whereas, in 
English, monosyllables, especially if of Saxon origin, are very 
often the most emphatic words in a period. Besides this, the 
majority of our monosyllables end with a consonant, often with 
two, and as the following word in most cases begins with a con- 
sonant, monosyllabic words generally have, in spite of our insen- 
sibility to mere quantity, if not a technical prosodical length, at 
least an environment of consonantal sounds, which makes them 
rhythmically long in comparison with the unaccented syllables of 
longer words, and of course unfits them for elements of the dac- 
tylic measures. 

The frequency of double and triple rhymes in the works of 
Sidney and other admirers of Italian and Spanish poetry, con- 
trasts remarkably with their comparative rarity in their contem- 
porary, Spenser, who, though influenced by romantic models in 
the plan of his story, followed native English precedents, or forms 
long naturalized, in the structure of his verse. "While Spenser 
very generally uses monosyllabic consonances, we find in Sidney 
such rhymes as, signify, dignify y mutable, suitable y notability, 
possibility ; carefulness, ivarefulness y delightfulness, rightful- 
20 



458 DOUBLE KHYMES. [Lect. xxiv. 

ness, sightfidness, spitefulness / disdainfulness, painfulness : 
besides many compound ones, as hideaway, hideaway ; pleasure 
doth, treasure doth ; number not, cumber not ; framed is, blamed 
is ; and even among the few poetic licenses of Chancer, we find 
this couplet in the Sompnoures Tale : 

Kef reshed more than in an hundred places, 

Sike lay the husbond man whos that the place is* 

The resuscitation of polysyllabic rhyme and its more frequent 
introduction into serious poetry, are partly the effect of our satiety 
with the endless repetition of particular monosyllabic rhymes into 
which English poetry had run, and a consequent craving for nov- 
elty in sound, and partly to the attempts at a more strict conform- 
ity of translations to their original, which is a natural result of our 
increasing familiarity with foreign literatures. To say nothing 
of the almost exclusive employment of double rhymes in Italian, 
it will be remembered that in French poetry, the use of couplets 
with rhymes ending alternately monosyllabically and with the 
mute e, or what are called masculine and feminine rhymes, is ob- 
ligatory; and many German writers, not only needlessly, but 
very unwisely, as I think, have imposed upon themselves the 
same inconvenient rule. In making English versions of poems 
in those languages where the metre of the original is retained, 
translators often endeavor to follow the rhymes of the text also, 
and the pedantic exactness with which this rule is adhered to, so 
far from producing an exact conformity, very often leads to a 
much wider disparity than would follow from the use of mono- 
syllabic rhymes alone. The French mute or feminine e, which 
in poetry nearly corresponds to the G-erman e final, scarcely has 
an equivalent in English orthoepy. Our short unaccented y final 

* Gower has some singularly constructed double rhymes, which serve to 
prove that the e final of words now monosyllabic was articulated in his time. 
On p. 282, Vol. I., Pauli's edition, is this couplet : 

To speke a goodly word unto me, 

For all the gold that is in Borne. 
And, p., 370 : 

So woll I nought, that any time 

Be lost of that thou hast do byme, (by me.) 

There are several similar examples in Hoccleve. In La male Regie, he 
rhymes liye me with tyme, and ny me (nigh me) with pryme, tyme, and cryme. 



Lect. xxiv.] OBSCUKE EKDISTGS. 459 

is much more distinctly articulated, and the English sounds near- 
est to it are those of the common pronunciation of a final and un- 
accented in such words as America, China, and the terminal er 
in. father, and the like, where our very inaudible utterance of the 
r leaves almost nothing for the ear but the obscure vowel sound 
preceding it, which is closely analogous in quality, and very nearly 
equal in prosodical quantity, to the French and German e final. 
But these sounds are of so rare occurrence in English, that they 
by no means answer the demands of the translator, and he accord- 
ingly resorts to our antiquated verbal forms in -est or -eth, as lovest, 
loveth, and to the participial form in -mg, as loving. These syl- 
labic augments are very far from being the prosodical equivalents 
of the syllables they are forced to stand for, and in fact do less 
truly represent those syllables than a monosyllabic rhyme, with 
the usual pause, would do. To exemplify : In Goethe's magnifi- 
cent Archangelic Trio in the Prologue to Faust, the alternate 
double rhymes are all in the unaccented e final, except in two in- 
stances, where the liquid n, which is almost as soft as the e alone, 
is made the termination. Yet in the best English translation, that 
of Mr. Brooks, these double rhymes are uniformly represented by 
active participles in -ing, except in one instance, where the trans- 
lator finds a double rhyme in ocean, motion, and another where 
he employs the old third person singular of the verbs lendeth, 
comprehendeth. The poem in question contains twenty-eight 
lines, ten of which end in e obscure, four in the liquid n. In 
Mr. Brooks's translation, otherwise admirable, ten of the corre- 
sponding fines of the version terminate with the active participle 
in -ing, one of the most uumelodious sounds of the language, and 
the Weise Reise, Starke Werke, schnelleHelle, 
of the original, where the final vowel constitutes the entire syl- 
lable, (the consonants belonging to the first syllable,) are repre- 
sented in English by sounding rounding, lending comprehend- 
ing, fleeting alternating, that is, syllables quantitatively short by 
syllables quantitatively long, which is in my judgment a wider 
departure from the prosody of the original than the employment 
of monosyllabic rhymes, with the inevitable pause after them, 
would have been.* 

* Although accent is the only recognized formal law of modern measure, 
yet, even independently of the arrangement of vowels and consonants which 



460 OBSCUKE ENDINGS. [Lect. xxiv. 

The Latins used trochees for spondees at the end of hexameters, 
the pause at the close of the measure serving to lengthen the 
short final syllable ; but they apparently preferred not to employ 
trochees ending in a vowel, unless the sense required or permitted 
a formal suspension of the voice ; and it will be found that most 
of the trochaic terminations of the Latin hexameters end in a con- 
sonant, or with a logical interruption in the syntax. The Greeks 
practised the same reserve, and helped the short vowel when 
practicable by the v e<ps\HVffTwov. 

The unpleasant effect of the use of our few inflectional double 
rhymes is remarkably shown in Tennyson's Claribel, a poem of 
twenty-one lines, thirteen of which end in , the old third person 
singular present indicative of the verb ; as lieth, sigrheth, boometh, 
hummeth, co?neth, and so forth. This, of course, is not accident- 
al, and habit makes this repetition of the lisping th tolerable to 
us; but what would be its effect on French or Italian ears, and 
what sounds would the unfortunate foreigner produce who should 
attempt to read the poem aloud % * 

That double rhymes will continue to be freely used in serious 
as well as in lighter English poetry, there is no doubt ; but, as we 
have few graceful and effective polysyllabic endings in words of 
Saxon etymology, the versifier will generally be forced to seek 
them in the Roman and Romance element of our speech, and 
thus the frequency of double rhymes tends to increase the pro- 
portion of Latin words in our poetic dialect. This is certainly a 
very serious evil, as it involves a sacrifice of purity of diction, and 
of a genuine native vocabulary, to a morbidly fastidious ear, and a 
taste perverted if not depraved by the study of foreign models. f 

determines the melodious quality of verse, we cannot, with impunity, abso- 
lutely disregard the temporal quantity of words and their elements. Such 
words as strength, shriek, writhe, or even such syllables as our participial ter- 
minations in -ing, are not by nature, and cannot be made by art — unless by the 
vulgar suppression of the final g, as goin, ~bein, etc. — the prosodical equivalents 
of endings formed by the obscure sound of the vowels with liquids, as in the 
last syllables of bridfe, father, stiffen. 

* Mrs. Browning's poem, To L. E. L., referring to her monody on Mrs. He- 
mans, well illustrates the connection between double rhymes and inflectional 
endings. That poem contains thirty-two lines. All the rhymes are inflectional 
but one pair, and eighteen of them are participial endings in -ing. 

f Puttenham (Haslewood, I. , 67) is severe upon Gower for helping himself 
to French rhymes when English would not serve his turn : 



Lect. xxiv.] SAXON ENDINGS. 461 

Poetry, by conforming foreign words to the native accentua- 
tion, lias made some amends for the mischief it has done to the 
language by employing aliens as substitutes for worthier aborigi- 
nals. It may render a yet greater service by restoring graceful 
and melodious endings which a too powerful Gallic influence has 
sacrificed. The existing want of double rhymes might be in part 
supplied by the revival of the Saxon inflections, many of which 
continued to be employed down to the time of Spenser. Why 
should we confine ourselves exclusively to our offensive ringing 
participial ending, and not rather say, sometimes at least, slthi- 
and, glitterand, singand, for shining, glittering, singing? And 

' ' For a licentious maker is, in truth, but a bungler, and not a Poet. Such 
men were, in effect, the most part of all your old rimers, and specially Gower, 
who, to make up his rime, would, for the most part, write his terminant silla- 
ble with false orthographie, and many times not sticke to put in a plaine 
French word for an English ; and so, by your leave, do many of our common 
rimers at this day." 

Many of the French words which first appear in Chaucer were introduced 
for the sake of the rhyme, and not unf requently taken as they stood in the poems 
which he translated or paraphrased ; but there is almost as great a predomi- 
nance of French rhymes in his own original works. ' ' The Squires Tale " has 
not been traced to any foreign source, and is believed to be of Chaucer's own 
invention, but of the six hundred and twenty-two lines of which that frag- 
ment consists, one hundred and eighty-seven end with Romance words, though 
the proportion of Anglo-Saxon words in the poem is more than ninety per 
cent. 

Mrs. Browning's "Cry of the Children" contains one hundred and sixty 
verses, with alternate double and single rhymes, and, of course, there are forty 
pairs of double rhymes, or eighty double-rhymed words. The proportion of 
Romance words in the whole poem is but eight per cent. ; but, of the eighty 
double-rhymed terminals, twenty-four, or thirty per cent., are Romance, so 
that nearly one-fourth of the one hundred Romance words introduced into the 
poem, are found in the double rhymes ; while, of the eighty single-rhymed 
terminals, seventy are certainly Anglo-Saxon, and of the remaining ten, three 
or four are probably so. 

In the "Dead Pan," there are about one hundred double-rhymed endings, 
less than one-half of which are Anglo-Saxon ; and, in the "Lost Bower," out 
of about one hundred and fifty double rhymes, more than one-third are 
Romance. 

I have made this examination of Mrs. Browning's works, not as a criticism 
upon the diction of one of the very first English poets of this age, the first fe- 
male poet of any age, but to show that even in the style of a great artist, of 
one who, by preference, employs native words wherever it is possible, a con- 
formity to the rules of continental versification inevitably involves the intro- 
duction of an undue proportion of Romance words. 



462 THOMSON AND SHENSTONE. [Lect. xxiv. 

why should we not now employ the old infinitive and plural in 
-en, as in these lines of Chaucer : 

For lack of answere, non of us shul dien, 
Al had ye seen a thing with bothe youre eyen. 

Ye sliullen rather swiche a thing espien 
Than I, and wher me beste were to allien. 

With hertly will they sworen and assenten 
To all this thing, ther saide not o wight nay : 
Beseching him of grace, or that they wenten, 
That he would granten hem a certain day. 

It is remarkable that Thomson, who employs archaic words 
and forms with such singularly happy effect in the Castle of Indo- 
lence, did not avail himself of this plural to vary his rhymes ; but 
in the whole of that most exquisite poem, there does not, I be- 
lieve, occur a single polysyllabic rhyme, unless the coupling of 
lowers and powers with hoiirs be so considered. These remarks 
apply with equal force to Shenstone's Schoolmistress, which owes 
much of its attraction to its archaisms. The only approach to a 
double rhyme in the whole poem is in the use of the same conso- 
nances as those cited from the Castle of Indolence. It is still 
more extraordinary that Spenser, with his boldness in the employ- 
ment of antiquated and abnormal inflections, should so seldom 
have resorted to a form of so great metrical convenience, and at 
the same time so melodious in articulation, as this old plural, the 
decay of which is perhaps the greatest loss that English has sus- 
tained in the mechanism of verse. 

The English language cannot ■ long supply the necessities of 
poetry without the introduction of new elements of verse. The 
ancient temporal metres were inexhaustible, because the permuta- 
tions and combinations of the prosodical feet were infinite ; but 
when we establish the rule that in every couplet there shall be two 
words which resemble each other not only in prosodical or in ac- 
centual length, but in their vowel and consonantal elements also, 
we introduce into verse an ingredient, the supply of which is 
limited. There are, as was observed in the last lecture, thousands 
of good poetic words which have no rhymes, others which have 
at most but a single one ; and of the rhyming words, thousands 
again are unsuited to metrical purposes. Hence rhyme tends to 



Lect. xxiv.] WANT OF EHYMES. 463 

reduce our available poetical vocabulary to a much narrower list 
than that of other languages not more copious, but which have 
not adopted the fetters of rhyme. "We must enlarge our stock 
by the revival of obsolete words and inflections from native 
sources, or by borrowing from the Romance languages ; or again, 
we must introduce the substitutes to which I have before alluded, 
and which will form the subject of the next lecture. 



LECTUKE XXV. 

ALLITERATION, LINE-RHYME, AND ASSONANCE. 

The interest which the study of native English, old and new, 
and of the sister dialects, now so generally excites, prompts the 
inquiry whether it is not possible to revive some of the forgotten 
characteristics of ancient Anglican poetry, and thus to aid the 
efforts of our literature to throw off or lighten the conventional 
shackles which classical and Romance authorities have imposed 
upon it. I propose to illustrate, by specimens original and imita- 
tive, the leading peculiarities of Anglo-Saxon and Old-Northern 
verse, as well as of one or two Romance metrical forms hitherto 
little if at all attempted in English, and to suggest experiment 
upon the introduction of some of them into English poetry. The 
only coincidences of sound known to English versification are, 
repetition of the same accentual feet in the same order, allitera- 
tion and terminal rhyme ; but these by no means exhaust the list 
of possible consonances, or even of those employed by some 
branches of the Gothic family. The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons 
was always rhythmical, but not always metrical. In modern 
criticism, rhythm is often loosely used as synonymous with metire y 
but they are properly distinguished. Bede speaks of the poetry 
of his native land as characterized by rhythm, and he thus dis- 
criminates between rhythm and metre : 

" It (rhythmus) is a modulated composition of words, not ac- 
cording to the laws of metre, but adapted in the number of its 
syllables to the judgment of the ear, as are the verses of our vul- 
gar (or native) poets." 

" Metre is an artificial rule with modulation ; rhythmus is the 
modulation without the rule. For the most part you find, by a 
sort of chance, some rule in rhythm ; yet this is not from an arti- 
ficial government, of the syllables, but because the sound and mod- 
(464) 



Lect. xxv.] EHYTHM AND METRE. 465 

ulation lead to it. The vulgar poets affect this rustically ; the 
skilful attain it by their skill." * 

Bede's definition of rhythm is not remarkable for clearness and 
precision. Indeed, it is difficult to define rhythm, for the same 
reason that it is difficult to describe a sound, and the embarrass- 
ment has been increased by the determination of critics to insist 
on finding rhythms where none exist. In all simply rhythmical 
poetry, there will occur lines which are, to all intents and pur- 
poses, mere prose, just as in metrical poetry we now and then 
meet fines which, by poetic license, violate the established canons 
of metre. In a general way, we may say that accent is to rhythm 
what the foot is to metre, and we may illustrate the prosodical 
value of the accent by comparing a rhythmical verse to a musical 
measure, where the number of accents is constant, though that of 
the notes is variable, just as is that of the syllables in rhythmical 
poetry. The only difference is that the laws of music are more 
strictly observed than those of rhythm, in which latter there is 
great license both as to the number and the position of the ac- 
cents. 

Metre may be defined to be a succession of poetical feet ar- 
ranged in regular order, according to certain types recognized as 
standards, in verses of a determinate length. 

The following fines, from the Primus Passus of Piers Plough- 
man's Yision, are rhythmical but not metrical, and they conform 
to the Saxon models in all respects, except that the short, or un- 
accented, syllables are generally more numerous than in Anglo- 
Saxon verse, the particles being often omitted in the poetry of 

that nation : 

What this mountaigne bymeneth, 
And the merke dale, 
And the f eld ful of folk, 
I shal yow faire shewe. 

A lovely lady of leere, 
In lynnen y-clothed, 
Came doun from a castel 
And called me faire, 
And seide, " Sone, slepestow ? 
Sestow this peple, 
How bisie thei ben 
Alle aboute the maze ? 

* Sharon Turner, Hist. Ang. Sax., B. ix., chap. 1. 
20* 



4:66 ALLITEKATION. [Lect. xxv. 

The mooste parte of this peple 
That passeth on this erthe, 
Have thei worship in this world, 
Thei wilne no bettre ; 
Of oother hevene than here 
Hold thei no tale." 

Metre, therefore, was not an essential constituent of Anglo- 
Saxon verse, and the few instances of its occurrence are chiefly 
accidental coincidences, although a Saxon bard may occasionally 
have employed it designedly, just as a modern poet may confine 
himself to double rhymes, or introduce alliteration. Of rhymed 
poetry there are a few examples, as well as of what is called line- 
rhyme, but, in general, like endings seem to have been avoided 
rather than sought for. An English ear, then, would recognize 
in Anglo-Saxon verse none of the formal characteristics of poetry, 
and it would strike a modern hearer as merely an unmeasured and 
irregular recitative. 

The most prominent formal feature of Anglo-Saxon versifica- 
tion is its regular alliteration ; and, with certain exceptions and 
licenses not necessary to be noticed at present, this was an indis- 
pensable characteristic of the poetry of that language, as well as 
generally of the Old-Northern or Icelandic. 

It was also much employed in Old-English, but whether its 
use was confined to certain districts or local dialects, or what were 
the circumstances that determined its application, is not, I be- 
lieve, yet ascertained. The Ormulum, which is not alliterative, 
has been supposed to have been written by a native of the North 
of England, because its dialect is marked by Scandinavianisms 
probably derived from the Danish population of the border coun- 
ties, and we should therefore expect that its versification, as well 
as its diction, would exhibit traces of the influence of Scandina- 
vian models ; but of this there are no indications. There is also 
a passage in Chaucer, now a regular stock quotation in all essays 
on this subject, which seems to show that the bards of otlier Eng- 
lish counties, most remote from the Danish colonies, did not em- 
ploy alliteration or even rhyme. The narrator in the Prologue 
to the Persones Tale, says : 

But trusteth well, I am a sotlierne man, 

I cannot geste, rom, ram, ruf, by my letter, 

And, God wote, rime hold I but little better. 



Lect. xxv.] ALLITERATION. 467 

There are many passages in other early English writers, which 
point to a marked difference between the poetic forms of North- 
ern and Southern England ; and the general inference wonld be, 
that the versification of the Sonth conformed to classical and Ko- 
mance, that of the North to Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian 
models. I do not discover sufficient evidence that, at any time 
after Norman English was recognized as an independent speech 
distinct from both its sources, alliteration was generally regarded 
as a regular and obligatory constituent of English verse, though 
it was freely employed as an ornament by individual writers in 
the fourteenth, and even fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. How- 
ever this may be, metre and rhyme, perhaps as much from the 
splendid success of Chaucer as from any other cause, became estab- 
lished characteristics of versification before the commencement 
of the fifteenth century ; and Piers Ploughman is the last work 
of any real importance in English literary history, which follows 
the original type of Anglican verse. 

The rule which governed the employment of alliteration, stated 
in its most general form, and without specifying the exceptions 
and qualifications that under different circumstances attended it, 
is, that in each couplet three emphatic words, (or, by poetic 
license, accented syllables,) two in the first line, and one in the 
second, must commence with the same consonant, or with vowels, 
in which latter case the initial letters might be, and generally 
were, different. The position of the alliterated words in the first 
line was arbitrary, and varied according to the convenience of the 
poet, but the alliteration in the second line should fall on the first 
emphatic word. Nevertheless, the lines were so short that the 
stress of voice would seldom fall on more than two syllables in 
either line, so that, in practice, the first of these syllables would 
almost necessarily be alliterated in the first line also. 

The fines already quoted for another purpose from one of the 
interesting poems just referred to, The Yision and the Creed of 
Piers Ploughman, the former by Langland, one of the Reformers 
before the Reformation, and written probably soon after the mid- 
dle of the fourteenth century, are alliterated according to these 
rules, as are also the following extracts, though with frequent de- 
partures from strict conformity to them : 



468 ALLITEKATION. [Lect. xxv. 

91 Pilgrymes and _palmeres 
Plighten hem togidere, 
For to seken seint Jame, 
And seintes at Rome. 
They wenten forth in hire wej, 
With many wise tales, 
And hadden leve to lyen 
Al hire lif. after. 

4293 Kynde wit wolde 

That each a wight wroghte, 
Or in dikynge or in delvynge, 
Or travaillynge in preieres ; 
Cbntemplatif lif or actif lif 
Crist would thei wroghte. 

4347 For murthereris are wanye leches, 
Lord hem amende ! 

They do men deje thorugh hir $rynkes, 
Er destynee it wolde. 

5655 Thilke that God #yveth moost 
Leest good thei deleth ; 
And moost un-&ynde to the commune 
That moost catel weldeth. 

6897 Any science under sonne, 
The sevene artz and alle, 
But thei ben Zerned for our Zordes love, 
Zost is all the tyme. 

The following are examples of alliteration upon a vowel : 

8597 And mobedient to ben wndernome 
Of any lif lyvyge. 

8609 With mwit and with outwit 
Tmagynen and studie. 

But though no longer entitled to rank as an organic element in 
English prosody, alliteration was often employed for two centu- 
ries later, not only by the inferior rhymesters to whom I have al- 
luded, but by some of the brightest ornaments of English litera- 
ture. Ascham, with all his contempt for rhyme, did not disdain 
alliteration, and his Elegy on John Whitney is full of it, though 
few of the verses go quite so far as this : 

Therefore, my heart, cease sighes and sobbes, cease sorrowe's seede to sow. 



Lect. xxv.] ALLITEKATION. 469 

Spenser uses it profusely, and sometimes with very happy effect, 
but not always judiciously. The following lines are from the 
Faerie Queene : 

The kwiglit was ?iothing nice where was no need. 

But direful deadly black, both leaf and bloom, 
Fit to adorn the dead and deck the dreary tomb. 

And /ills with /lowers /air .Flora's painted lap. 

I/ollow here the/ooting of thy/eet. 

He giveth comfort to her courage cold. 

Now smiling smoothly like the summer's day. 

Thy mantle marred wherein thou maskedst late. 

The alliteration is even more marked in these lines from Feb- 
ruarie in the Shepheards Calendar, two of which have been 
already cited for another purpose : 

But 7iome him lasted with furious 7ieate, 
Encreasing his wrath with many a threate ; 
i7is Aarmef ull Ratchet lie 7ient in 7iand ; 

and in this, from Mother Hubberds Tale : 

232 Gay without good is good heart's greatest loathing. 

So, T. Heywood, very melodiously, in the Hierarchie : 

To wail the wants that wait upon the Muse. 

Sidney, on the other hand, seldom introduces alliteration. In 
the Arcadia he censures those those who " course a letter, as if 
they were bound to follow the method of a dictionarie "; and in 
the fifteenth sonnet in Astrophel and Stella, he treats it as an ev- 
idence of poverty of genius : 

You that do Dictionaries method bring 

Into you rimes, running in rattling rows, 

****** 

You take wrong waies ; those f ar-f et helps be such 

As do bewray a want of inward touch. 

Shakespeare occasionally ridicules the use, or rather abuse, of 
alliteration. Thus, in a couplet in the prologue to the interlude 



470 ALLITERATION. [Lect. 

of Pyramus and Thisbe in the Midsummer Night's Dream, we 
have this example : 

Whereat with blade, with Moody Slameful Slade, 
He bravely broached his foiling Moody breast. 

And in Love's Labour's Lost, Holof ernes says : " I will something 
affect the letter, for it argues f acility : 

" The praiseful princess pierced and pricked a pretty pleasing pricket." 

Milton, and the classic school of poets generally, avoid allitera- 
tion altogether ; and so completely was it banished from English 
measures during most of the seventeenth century, that its former 
existence as an element of versification was forgotten. One of 
Waller's critical biographers says : " That way of using the same 
initial letters in a line, which throws the verse off more easily, as — 

" When man on many multiplied his kind, 

was first introduced by him ; as in this verse : 

" Oh, how I long my tender limbs to lay ! " 

Dryden revived the use of alliteration, but there was long a cer- 
tain fastidiousness with respect to its employment. It has, how- 
ever, been gradually winning its way again to favor, and a great 
modern poet has not scrupled to write — 

"He rushed into the/ield, and,/oremost/ighting, fell." 

Alliteration was wholly unsuited to the metrical system of the 
ancients, which rejected all echoing of sound, and its accidental 
occurrence was regarded as a rhetorical blemish. But it, never- 
theless, often passed unnoticed by ears keenly sensible only to the 
prosodical quantity and musical intonation of words, and examples 
of the frequent, though doubtless undesigned, repetition of an 
initial consonant in the same verse or period, occur in the most 
fastidious of the classic writers. Thus, Cicero, in De Officiis, has 

this phrase : 

"/Sensim sine sensu setas senescit ;* 

* In the phrase quoted from Cicero, it is highly probable, as a friend sug- 
gests to me, that sine sensu is a gloss which has found its way into the 



Lect. xxv.] ALLITERATION. 471 

and minor critics, who, happily for scholars devoted to graver 
pursuits, can find leisure for the chase of such small deer, have 
collected many examples of the like kind in other great authors 
of ancient Greece and Eome. 

Although specially characteristic of Gothic poetry, alliteration 
has been by no means confined to it.* It is employed by the 
Finlanders and by several of the Oriental nations, and after the 
revival of literature it found its way into the humorous Latin 
verses of the sixteenth century. The structure of Latin, in which 
particles and pronouns may often be omitted, facilitates allitera- 
tion, however distasteful to classic ears. There are many modern 
Latin poems in alliterative verse, and the best known of these, 
the Pugna Porcorum, or Battle of the Pigs, in which every word 
begins with the letter^?, extends to several hundred verses. 

Analogous to purely alliterative poems, or rather their converse, 
are what are called lipogrammatic compositions. In these, a par- 
ticular letter or letters are excluded, and an ancient poetaster 
made himself notorious by a paraphrase of the entire Iliad, which 
rejected alpha or a, from the first book, beta or b from the sec- 
ond, and so of the rest. Lipogrammatism does not affect the 
rhythm or metre of verse, and so poor a conceit would not 
deserve to be noticed, had not distinguished authors occasionally 

text. In the Tusc. Disp. Cicero quotes some remarkable instances of allitera- 
tive verse from early Roman poets. Thus, from Ennius : 

Qui alteri exitium ^>arat 
Eum scire qportet sibi £>aratam western ut £>articipet. 

Tusc. Disp., II. 17. 
From Accius : 

Jlfajor mihi moles, majus miscendumst malum 
Qui illius acerbum cor contundam et comprimam. 

Impius hortatur me frater, ut meos malis miser 

Jfandarem natos. Tusc. Disp. , IV. 36. 

* Alliteration was a regular characteristic of Icelandic verse, and it often ap- 
pears to have been designedly introduced into. prose. There is a long passage 
in alliterative prose in the Saga Olafs konungs bins helga, K. 60, and a still 
longer near the close of App. EE, to that Saga in Forn. Sog. V. The fol- 
lowing is an extract from the former : * * * " kallaS u hann Zinan ok 
KtflMtan, hasgan ok 7mggo$an, mildan ok mjiiklyndan, dtran ok -uingoSan, 
fryggvan ok friilyndan/orsjalan ok/astorSan, #joflan ok ^oSgjarnan, /rsegan 
ok /alyndan, ^6San ok #lsepavaran, stjornsaman ok stiltan vel, ^eyminn at 
#uSs logum ok #(5ra manna," &c. 



472 ALLITERATION. [Lect. xxv. 

practised it. Lope de Yega condescended to this trifling, by 
writing a novel in which the letters a and I were not employed. 
Yriarte was guilty of a similar folly, and there have been some 
later pieces in the same absurd style. 

To us, who have no ear for quantitative prosody, alliteration, 
provided it does not obtrude itself as an affectation, is generally 
agreeable, and besides the sensuous pleasure it gives us, it has 
often, and in earlier stages of the Gothic dialects had still m*)re 
frequently, a real significance. The inseparable particles used as 
prefixes were much less freely employed in those languages than 
in Greek and Latin, and the first syllable of words, which was 
also usually the accented one, generally contained the radical. 
Eow, particular combinations of consonants are found to occur 
very frequently in vocables of the same primitive signification ; 
and therefore, of a given number of words in any homogeneous 
language, beginning with the same consonant, or combination of 
consonants, the majority will probably be more or less nearly 
allied in sense; and consequently, alliteration, or the use of 
prominent words with the same initial consonants, is a means of 
giving increased energy to a proposition, by a repetition of the 
emphatic radicals which enter into it. The pith of the alliter- 
ative proverbs so common among the Gothic races often lay 
partly in this iteration of meaning ; and a perception of the 
relation between cognate words, sometimes obscure, sometimes 
distinct, not unfrequently gives a keen pungency to idiomatic 
expressions. On the other hand, where from the changes of 
language, words originally allied have become distinguished or op- 
posed in meaning, or where different words in a given proverb 
or phraseological combination are derived from linguistic sources 
which ascribe a different signification to initial consonants, the 
verbal contrast is much aided in effect by alliteration. 

Not only do our English proverbs often derive much of their 
point from this element, but many of our most favorite and 
most frequently quoted poetical sentiments and similes owe their 
currency to the same source. Few lines in English poetry are 
oftener repeated than Campbell's — 

Like angels' visits, few and far between. 
This simile Campbell borrowed, unconsciously perhaps, from 



Lect. xxv.] ALLITERATION. 473 

an older author, and lie ingeniously contrived at one blow to 
destroy the beauty of the thought, and yet make the verse im- 
mortal, by giving it a form that soothes the ear and runs glibly 
off the tongue. As is shown in Bartlett's Quotations, John 
Morris, about the close of the seventeenth century, had said — 

Like angels' visits, short and bright, 

and Blair, fifty years later, had improved the thought into — 

Visits, like those of angels, short and far between. 

The simile is here very beautiful and expressive. Campbell's 
version is a mere tautological repetition of the latter half of the 
thought. The adjective few, in the phrase " few and far be- 
tween," of course refers to the number of visits, not of the 
visitors. If the visits are ' far between,' they must necessarily be 
* few ' with reference to any supposed period of time ; and on 
the other hand, if they are ' few,' but yet continued, as seems 
implied, through the whole earthly life of humanity, they can be 
paid only at long intervals. ' Few ' and 'far between' are, then, 
equivalent expressions, and the brevity of the visits, a circum- 
stance very important to the completeness of the thought, is lost 
sight of by Campbell altogether. Yet Blair's exquisite simile 
is rarely quoted, while Campbell's feeble and diluted alliterative 
version of it is as hackneyed as the tritest proverb. So easily are 
we led by the ear.* It is fair to admit that the epithets are more 
fitly applicable to the " hours of bliss," which form the subject 
of the couplet — 

What though my winged hours of bliss have been, 
Like angels' visits, few and far between : 

because ' few ' applied to ' hours ' may be supposed to indicate a 
short continuance of time, which it cannot do when referred to 
' visits '; but to make the simile truly descriptive, the qualifica- 
tions expressed must belong both to the thing compared and to 
that to which it is likened. 

* Byron's objections to the octosyllabic verse have no better foundation than 
the alliteration in the phrase, " fatal facility " and many a shallow critic has 
condemned fine poetry in this beautiful metre, upon the strength of that un- 
lucky expression. 



474 LINE-EHYME. [Lect. xxv. 

Besides alliteration, some Gothic nations nearly allied to the 
Anglo-Saxon had its converse, namely, the ending of words or 
accented syllables with the same consonant or coalescing conso- 
nants, the vowels being different, as, for example, in the words 
bad led, find band, sin run. We have no name for this coinci- 
dence of sound, because it is not with us, or with any of the 
nations of Central or Southern Europe, a regular element of 
verse. It might very well be called consonance, but that word 
is already appropriated to express, generally, resemblance of sound, 
and, especially, full rhyme in both the vowel and the consonants 
which follow it. In Icelandic poetry, this imperfect rhyme is 
regularly employed, and by the critics of that literature, is called 
skothending, a word of obscure etymology, which we may 
conveniently translate by half -rhyme. 

Although terminal rhyme is known to, and not unfrequently 
employed by, the Icelanders, their poetic consonance generally 
consists in what is called line-rhyme, in conjunction with an allitera- 
tion regulated as in Anglo-Saxon. In line-rhyme, the correspond- 
ing syllables occur, not at the end of successive lines, but in the 
same line. The rhymes are either of the character which I have 
described as half rhyme, or like the perfect consonances of other 
languages, which latter form of rhyme the Icelanders call a 5 a 1 - 
hending. 

Line-rhyme is a constituent of all but the most ancient forms 
of Icelandic verse. Both line-rhyme and terminal rhyme occa- 
sionally occur in Anglo-Saxon poetry, though they are neither 
essential nor, in the remains of that literature which time has 
spared to us, frequent ; but from the close general analogy be- 
tween the languages and the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons and the 
Northmen, and the mutual relations between those nations, it is 
not improbable that the Anglo-Saxons may sometimes have em- 
ployed both forms of line-rhyme in a regular way, as the Iceland- 
ers always continued to do. 

The rule of construction of these consonances is, that in each 
line there shall be two accented syllables which either form a 
perfect rhyme with each other or have the same final consonant 
or consonants with different vowels. The general distribution of 
the perfect and imperfect rhymes is, that the half, or consonantal, 
rhyme shall occur in the first line of the couplet, the full rhyme 



Lect. xxv.] ICELANDIC VEESE. 475 

in the second. The first rhyming syllable may be at the begin- 
ning or in the middle of the verse ; the second should fall on the 
penultimate. There are many metres in Icelandic verse, and 
some of them are discriminated only by logical, rhetorical, or 
grammatical distinctions. In the favorite metre, or what may 
be called the heroic, " that in which," as Snorri says, " most fin- 
ished verse is composed." m e 5 f>eima hsetti er flest ort, 
J>at er vandat er, the lines consist of three trochaic feet or 
their equivalents, and are arranged in strophes of eight verses. 
The following imitation exhibits the application of these rules to 
English verse : 

So f tly now are s i f t ing 

Sn owson landscape f r o z en. 

Thick ly /all the/1 ak e lets, 

Fe a t h ery-light, to g e t h er, 

Sh owerof silver pour ing, 

5ound less, all a r o u n d us, 

Field and river /o 1 d ing 

Fa, i r in mantle r a r est. 

(71 a d in garment clou d- wrought — 

Co v ered light ab o v e her, — 

(7a 1 m in cooling slum hers 

(7r a d led, Earth hath laid her, 

8 o to rest in s i lence, 

Safe from heats that chafe her, 

Till her troubled p u 1 ses 

Tt u er beat, and f e w er. 

E v ery throb is o v er — 
A 1 1 to stillness f a 1 1 en ! 
Mowers upon her/o r e head 
Fling not yet, O S p r i n g-time ! 
St i 1 1 yet stay aw h i 1 e, too, 
5um mer fair, thy com ing ! 
Linger yet still longer, 
Lest thou break her rest ing. 

Although the feet in which the line-rhymes occur are usually 
separated by intervening words, and arranged according to the 
rules just laid down, they are sometimes brought together at the 
beginning of the lines, as in the following verses :* 

* The following is the example of this metre given by Snorri, Hattatal, 
132:— 



476 ICELANDIC YEESIFICATION. [Lect. xxv. 

Boll, O rill, forever ! 
Pest not, lest thy wavelets, 
Sheen, as shining crystal, 
/Shrink and sink to darkness ! 
We n d with wind ing border 
TTi d e as i d e still turning, 
Green o'erg r o w n with grasses, 
G a y as M a y with blossoms — 

toward yon lowered castle, 
Ti m e-and-r h y m e-renowned. 
PightlyZet thy waves then 
L e a p the s t e e p y ledges, 
Po u r in p u r est silver 
Proudly, loudly over, 
Pan cing d o w n with laughter, 
P a s h ing, flash ing onward, 

Si n g ing songs unending, 
&w e e t, rep 1 e t e with gladness. 
P r a p e with d r i p ping mosses 
Pell and fell o'erhanging ; 
Pave with I i v ing water 
Powlygrow ing sedges, 
Pill thy tf oil-worn current 
Purneth, yearning, sea-ward. 

In another of the very numerous forms of Icelandic poetry, 
the feet containing the full-rhyme are placed last in the verse, as 
in this imitation : * 

Hilmir hjalma skiirir 
herSir sverSi roSnu, 
hrjota hvitir askar 
hrynja brynja spangir ; 
hnykkja Hlakkar eldar 
harSa svarfcar landi, 
remma rimmu gloSir 
randa grand of jarli. 

* Snorri, Hattatal, 135, gives, in the following hemistrophe, an example of 
the form imitated in the text : 

A'lmdrosar skylr isa 
ar flest megin bara sara ; 
ksenn lsetr hres a hronnum 
hjalmsvell jofurr gella fella ; 

In another variation still, in addition to the half -rhyme of the first line, 
there is a full rhyme in the third and fourth feet, thus : 

Hraeljoma fellr hrimi, timi 
har vex of gram sara ara, 



Lect. xxv.] ALLITEBATION AND LINE-KHYME. 477 

He a r the torrent h u r ry ! 
iZeadlong rash ly dash ing 
Down, in deafening thun der, 
Depths eye hath not f a t h omed ! 
Mighty ?'ocks upr o o t ing, — 
.Rudely s h a t tering, scat tering 
A 1 1 its own bright s i 1 ver 
into shape less v a p or. 

Stay, O/lood, that/liest 
Fast toward night uns i g h t ly ! 
Fa i t, ye waves, a 1 i t tie — 
Wisdom's speech would teach you ! 
L i g h t and M e are s w e e t er, 
Zovelier far, than are the 
Cloud, the cold, the s h a d ow 
Closing round the bound less ! 

Although line-rhyme might have been occasionally employed 
with advantage in Anglo-Saxon verse, as I think it may still be in 
some departments of English poetry, yet it is fortunate for the 
interests of our old literature that it did not assume all the fet- 
ters of Scandinavian prosody. The Old-Northern mythologic 
poems, as those of the elder Edda, are much simpler in their 
structure than those of the later Icelandic bards, and, like Beo- 
wulf and the poems ascribed to Csedmon, they are usually without 
line-rhyme, and often with but a single pair of alliterative syl- 
lables in the first verse of the couplet. In point of poetic excel- 
lence, the simplest measures generally rank highest, while the 
excessively intricate and artificial forms of the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries have seldom any merit but that which belongs 
to the skilful execution of nugce difficiles. A conformity to rules 
so difficult could be purchased only by the frequent sacrifice of 
the rhetorical beauties of poetry, and the heroic rhymes of the 
Icelanders are crowded with frigid conceits, and as inferior to 
the grand simplicity and the elevated inspiration of Anglo-Saxon 
poetry, as their narrative prose is superior to the comparatively 
barren, unphilosophical, and even puerile historical literature of 
our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. 

There are also remarkable instances both of alliteration and of 



frost nemr, of hlyn Hristar, Mistar 
herkaldan frrom skjaldar aldar. 



478 ALLITERATION AND LINE-RHYME. [Lect. xxv. 

line-rhyme wliere we should least expect to find them, namely, in 
the literature of Italy and Greece. Take as an example of half- 
rhyme a stanza of ottava rima in the twenty-third canto of the 
Morgante Maggiore of Pulci : 

La casa cosa parea bretta e brutta, 
Vinta dal vento ; e la natta e la notte 
Stilla le stelle, ch'a tetto era tutta. 
Del pane appena ne dette ta' dotte, 
Pere avea pure e qualche f ratta frutta ; 
E svina e svena di botto una botte ; 
Poscia per pesci lasche prese a 1' esca ; 
Ma il letto allotta a la frasca fu fresca.* 

The following sonnet in the Pisan dialect, from a note to the 
works of Redi, abounds in full line-rhyme : 

Similemente . gente . criatura . 
La portatura . pura . ed avenente . 
Faite plagente . mente per natura . 
Sicchen altura . cura . vola gente . 

Callor parvente . nente . altra figura . 
Non a f attura . dura . certamente . 
Pero neente . sente . di ventura . 
Chissua pintura . seusa . no prezente . 

Tanto doblata . data . v& bellessa 
E addoressa . messa . con plagensa . 
Cogna chei pensa . sensa . permirata • 

Pero amata . fatta . vunnaltessa . 
Che la fermessa . dessa conoscensa . 
In sua sentensa . bensa . onorata . 

* There is a very similar instance in the hundredth and hundred and first 
stanzas of the sixth canto of the Malmantile Bacquistato. The editor, Puccio 
Lamoni (Paulo Minucci,) remarks on the word Usticcio in st. 101 : E la 
figura che i Greci dicono Parechesi, ed e" quando si dicono due parole che han- 
no lo stesso, o poco differente suono, e di verso significato," and he refers to a 
canzone of Guittone d'Arrezzo, made up of "queste allusioni di parole," the 
conclusion of which is as follows : 

Movi canzone adessa, 
E vanne a Rezzo ad essa, 
Da cui eo tegno ed o 
Se n' alcun ben mi do, 
E di, che presto so, 
Se vuol, di tornar so. 

Other examples are stated in Bindo Bonichi, and Francesco da Barberino. 



Lect. xxv.] ALLITEKATION AND LINE-KHYME. 479 

Mullach, in his Grainmatik der Griechischen Yulgarsprache, 
cites several lines of alliterative line-rhyming Greek verse, from 
a hymn " by a Christian writer belonging to the school of the 
later Orphic poets," but without any indication of the probable 
date of the composition, which, however, cannot be by any means 
recent. The following are the first five verses : 

ILaipe Kop-q xapieooa, x a P r l T 0K-e ) X&Pl ua tout/ov, 

TTapdev' k^rjjxepioig ovpavioig re QiXij. 
Xalpe Koprj tt&vtcov fieya x^ppiari X®Pl bLa Zafiovoa. 

X^pp-a peyaa-&eveuv x&PP a T ' CKpavporepuv, 
Xalpe tt6vg>v re TivTEipa, dopuv pvrecpd r' dvanruv. 

The poem is referred to by Mullach for other purposes, and he 
makes no remarks upon the character of its versification. It is, 
however, like the Italian examples just cited, a mere jeu d' esprit, 
and there is not the slightest probability that the authors of any 
of them knew that they were introducing into their verses 
the characteristic features of a poetic literature so alien to that of 
Southern Europe as the songs of the Scandinavian bards. But 
they are the more interesting for that very reason, as instances of 
the spontaneous origination of similar poetic forms, in nations 
whose languages and whose literary culture have little or nothing 
in common. 

Although half -rhyme may be said to be peculiar to Icelandic 
poetry, if indeed it did not exist in Anglo-Saxon, yet there are 
examples of the employment of both full and imperfect line- 
rhyme in modern English. The mere introduction of a full 
rhyme in the middle of a verse, as when Coleridge says : 

And ice, mast-high, came floating by, 

is not a case in point, for this is only writing in one line what 
properly should be counted two ; but Byron's verse — 

LigJitlj and brightly breaks away 
The morning from her mantle grey, 

is a true specimen of line-rhyme, as is also Burns's line^ — - 

Her look was like the morning star ; 

look and like forming a half -rhyme. These and some of the many 



480 LINE-KHYME IN ENGLISH. [Lect. xxv. 

other similar examples, are probably accidental, but there are cases 
where we must suppose the introduction of such coincidences of 
sound to be intentional, though they have certainly never been 
regarded as regidar constituents of any form of English verse.* 

In Longfellow's Miles Standish, containing about one thousand 
verses, there occur not less than forty instances of marked, as well 
as others of less conspicuous, line-rhyme. These may have been 
undesigned, but, with Mr. Longfellow's trained ear, and his fa- 
miliarity with Old-Northern literature, I should rather suppose 
them purposely, or at least not unconsciously, introduced into 
such lines as the following : 

Here in front you can see the very dint of the bullet ; 

Long at the window he stood and wistfully gazed on the landscape ; 

Washed with a cold gray mist, the vapory breath of the east wind, 
Forest and meadow and hill, and the steel-blue rim of the ocean. 

You are a writer, and I am a, fighter, but here is a fellow 

Who could both write and fight, and in both was equally skilful. 

Sudden and loud as the sound of a soldier grounding his musket. 

In this last line, the alliteration is very observable, as also in the 
following : 

-Steady, straightforward, and strong, with irresistible logic. 

Lying silent and sad in the afternoon shadows and sunshine. 

ifusing a moment before them, ifiles Standish paused, as if doubtful. 

I think the introduction of these consonances a very happy 
feature in Mr. Longfellow's hexameters, and believe that a still 
more liberal use of them, especially of the line-rhyme, would 
facilitate the naturalization of a measure not easily reconcilable 
with English orthoepy. 

In spite of the excessive difficulty of the Icelandic versification, 

* Among the verses prefixed to Sylvester's Du Bartas, 1611, there is a pyra- 
midal piece, with the heading, Lectoribus, which concludes with a couplet, 
containing a quaint half -rhyme : 

Not daring meddle with Apelles table, 
This have I muddled, as my Mvse was able. 



Lect. xxv.] STRONG INFLECTIONS AND HALF-RHYMES. 481 

and the limited number of perfect rhymes which the Old-North- 
ern language affords, the bards of that nation seem to have been 
scarcely inferior to the modern Italians in facility of improvisa- 
tion. The old sagas contain numerous examples of extempora- 
neous compositions, of elaborately complicated structure, but with 
a regular rhythmical flow ; and, indeed, most of the verses quoted 
in the sagas are improvisations. This was rendered practicable 
only by almost unbounded freedom of syntactical arrangement, 
and the extent to which the Old-Northern poets avail themselves 
of this liberty, combined with the highly figurative style of their 
diction, renders the interpretation of their chants a matter of no 
small difficulty to modern readers.* 

The use of half -rhymes in Scandinavian verse is neither an ac- 
cident, nor the arbitrary adoption of a purely conventional form 
of poetical ornament, but it is a natural result of the Old-North- 
ern system of inflections. In the Icelandic language, the strong 
inflections were prevalent in all classes of words which admit of 
declension or conjugation. The strong inflection consists, not 
uniformly, indeed, but usually, in varying words for case or tense, 
by changing the vowel of the radical syllable, leaving the conso- 
nants undisturbed ; and hence every verb or noun varied by this 
method, produces in its inflection half -rhymes. Thus, in English, 
hind makes in .the preterite, hound, find found, run ran, sing 
sang, and in the participle, sung ; spring, sprang, sprung / 
write, wrote, and in older forms both writ and wrate. So in 
nouns we have singular foot, plural feet, man plural men.\ 

The frequent use of this mode of inflection could not fail to 

* Haralds HarSraSa Saga, chapter 108, contains a sort of trial of skill in im- 
provisation, in which King Harald, porgils, a disguised Norwegian warrior, 
and p joSolfr, an eminent skald, all took part. The poetry, indeed, is far from 
being of a high order, but the incident is interesting, on account of a criticism 
of the king upon the versification of Thiodolf , who had coupled g r o m and 
s k o m m as a line-rhyme, that is, a syllable ending in a single, with a syllable 
ending in a double consonant ; too great a license for the nicety of an Old- 
Northern ear. 

f In Icelandic, as in English, both forms of inflection exist, and are not un- 
frequently employed in the same word, but the strong declension and conjuga- 
tion are more prominent and marked in the articulation of the former, and the 
letter-change often extends to more than one syllable, thus : nom sing, h a r - 
pari, a harper, becomes horpurum in the dative plural; nom. sing, 
masc. a n n a r r , other, oSrum in the dative singular. 
21 



482 ASSONANCE. |Xect. xxv. 

draw the attention especially to the vowels, the seizing of which 
was essential to the comprehension of propositions where words 
so inflected occurred, and the ear would consequently be rendered 
more acutely sensible to vowel-sounds, and would ascribe to them 
a greater relative weight in orthoepy than belongs to them in 
other tongues, which, though the numerical proportions of their 
vowels and consonants may be the same as in the Gothic lan- 
guages, are inflected by augmentation. Hence, the vowels might 
readily become metrical constituents of a character not less im- 
portant than that which they possessed in the classic metres, and 
occupy as conspicuous a place in the prosody, as in the grammar 
of the language. 

It was natural that an element of articulation, syntactically 
prominent, and just frequent enough in its occurrence to be 
agreeable and not wearisome, should have suggested itself as a 
convenient prosodical resource ; and it is a proof of the general 
truth of the doctrine I have advanced concerning the natural re- 
lation between inflections and prosody, that the few inflectional 
vowel-changes of the Greeks, such as the temporal augment, or 
the substitution of a prosodically long for a prosodically short 
vowel, as r/ for e, go for o, should have fallen in with their metrical 
system, just as strong inflections did with that of the Scandinavian. 

I spoke of half -rhyme as the converse of alliteration. The lit- 
erature of the Spanish Peninsula presents us with the reverse of 
half -rhyme. I refer to assonance, an element of a much more 
subtle and ethereal character than any constituent of prosody 
which we have hitherto considered. Assonance consists in using 
the same vowel with different consonants. Thus, nice and might, 
war and fall, mate and shape, feel and need, are instances of as- 
sonance. This imperfect rhyme may be said to be peculiar to 
the versification of Spain and Portugal, though it has been em- 
ployed in Germany by Frederick Schlegel in his tragedy, Alar- 
cos, by Apel in his Spectrebook, and by others in translations 
from Calderon and other Spanish poets. The rule of assonance, 
disregarding certain exceptions not necessary here to be particu- 
larized, requires the repetition of the same vowels in the assonant 
words, from the last accented vowel inclusive. Thus, man and 
hat, nation and traitor, penitent and reticence, are assonant couples 
of words of one, two, and three syllables, respectively. ' 



Lect. xxv.] ASSONANCE. 483 

To an unpracticed ear assonance is scarcely perceptible, and it 
is the more obscnre because it is generally introduced only in 
alternate verses, or the second of each couplet, the first lines of 
the successive couplets having neither rhyme nor any other cor- 
respondence of sound. In the following specimen, in order to 
render the assonance more conspicuous, it is employed in the first 
three lines of each stanza, the fourth being left blank, and it is 
made monosyllabic, instead of ending the line with a trochee as 
is usual in Spanish verse : 

Let me choose, and I will dwell 
"Where the sea, with sounding tread 
Climbeth, till his feathery crest 
Brush the mountain's feet. 

Let me choose, and on such shore 
Will I plant my lowly home, 
Where the unresting billows roll 
Cliffs eternal near. 

There, beneath transparent skies, 
Where the vine and olive thrive, 
Where the golden orange smiles — 
Listening to the wave, 

There how gladly would I sleep, 
Ocean's music in mine ear, 
Through the night of time, hot feel, 
Weary till the day.* 

* By way of more exactly illustrating the Spanish assonance, I give a trans- 
lation of a few stanzas of a well-known Spanish ballad, in which the princi- 
pal correspondence falls on the penultimate syllable of the verse : 

Passing was the Moorish monarch 
Through the city of Granada, 
From the portal of Elvira 
To the gate of Bivarambla. 

Woe is me, Alhama ! 

« 

Letters came to say, Alhama 
By the Christians now was h<?lden. 
On the ground he flung the letters, 
Slew the messenger that hove them. 
Woe is me, Alhama ! 

Straightway from his mule alighting, 
Then he leaps upon his charger, 



484 ANNOMINATION. [Lect. xxv. 

In a former lecture, I noticed the large proportion of Romance 
words which Mrs. Browning employs in her double rhymes. 
Mrs. Browning always prefers the Saxon word where choice is 
possible, and I ascribe to this preference her employment of as- 
sonant or vowel-rhymes, to an extent that a more timid poet 
would scarcely venture upon. 

Of about fifty couples of double rhymes in The Dead Pan, a 
dozen pair are assonants, as, know from, snow-storm ; honest, 
admonisht ; silence, islands; glory, evermore thee; iron, in- 
spiring. In the Mournful Mother we find show him, flowing ; 
behold not, folded ; glory, before thee ; psalm now, palm bough ; 
and in the Lost Bower, advances, branches ; prized I, unadvised 
by ; come there, summer ; mine be, pine tree ; for me, door-way. 
These are not all Saxon words, it is true, but in most instances 
one, if not both, of the corresponding words is native, and the 
admission of assonance in these would render the ear more in- 
dulgent in rhymes of foreign extraction. The example of so 
high a poetic authority, in introducing assonance as a license, 
might well justify systematic experiment upon its regular em- 
ployment. 

G-erman literature presents instances of what has been called 
annomination, a word certainly not very expressive of the char- 
acter of the thing designated. Annomination consists in op- 
posing to each other, at emphatic points in the verse or period, 
words of similar sound but different signification or use, as in 
this example from Tieck : 

Wenn ich s t i 1 1 die Augen lenke, 
Auf die abendliche S t i 1 1 e , 
Und nur d e n k e dass ich d e n k e, 

Up the Zacatin he gallops, 
Comes in haste to the Alhambra, 
Woe is me, Alhama ! 

Having entered the Alhambra, 
On the instant gave he orders 
That the trumpet should be sounded, 
And the silver-throated cornets. 
Woe is me, Alhama ! 

In the original, the same assonant vowel, a, is continued through the entire 
poem, but this, though very common, is not obligatory, and the vowel is 
varied in different stanzas of the translation. 



Lect. xxv.] ANAMINATION. 485 

Will nicht r u h e n mir der W i 1 1 e, 
Bis icli sie in R u li e senke. 

Twilight stillness when I drink, 
And myself am gazing still, 
Thinking only that I think, 
Then will never rest my will 
Till to rest I bid it sink. 

If the English lines happen to remind the reader of Pope's 
Yerses by a Person of Quality, he may be assured that the in- 
sipidity is not the fanlt of the translator. Sidney has indulged, 
in this conceit, in what Landor calls the best of his poems, the 
eighth song in Astrophel and Stella : 

Now be still, yet still believe me ; 

and elsewhere he says : 

A plaining song plaine-singing voyce requires. 

Spenser, too, in the Shepheards Calendar, Jannarie, has these 

couplets : 

I love thilke Lasse, {alas ! why do I love ?) 
And am iorlorne, (alas ! why am I lorne ?) 

And thou, unluckie Muse, that wontst to ease 

My musing minde, yet canst not when thou should. 

And in Mother Hubberds Tale : 

Nor ordinance so needful, but that hee 
Would violate, though not with violence. 

A still better example occurs in the Author's Induction to the 
Mirror for Magistrates, Haslewood's edition I. 15 : 

And leaves began to leave the shady tree.* 

* Some of these examples remind us of a form of Icelandic verse, several 
varieties of which are described in the Hattatal of Snorri, under the name of 
refhvorf. Its peculiarity consists in the introduction of pairs of words 
opposite in meaning, such as hot, cold ; fire, water ; earth, air ; attack, defend, 
&c. In the most perfect examples, the words are alike in accent and number 
of syllables, and they should occur in the same line, but this, of course, would 
be practicable only to a very limited extent. Snorri gives a strophe of eight 
lines, composed wholly of such disparate couples, but in most of the varieties 
he describes, much greater license is allowed. Hattatal, c. 93-99. 



486 LOVE OF ALLITEEATION. [Lect. xxv. 

Hardly to be distinguished from annoiriination is tlie euphuism 
of Queen Elizabeth's age, which Scott's character of Sir Percie 
Shafton has made familiar to modern readers. Scott has rather 
caricatured the style of Lilly, from whose principal work this pe- 
culiarity of expression derives its name, and Shafton is more 
euphuistic than Lilly, the great euphuist himself. Sir Philip Sid- 
ney uses it as frequently, perhaps, as any other writer. Such 
phrases as these are of constant occurrence in his prose works : 

"Remembrance still forced our thoughts to worke upon this place where 
we last (alas that the word last should so long last /) did grace our eyes upon 
her ever flourishing beauty." 

" Blessed be thou, Urania, the sweetest fair nesse, and the fairest sweetnesse." 

Spenser seldom indulges in this fashion of his time, but has oc- 
casionally a euphuistic line, as these from the Shepheards Cal- 
endar : 

With mourning pyne I ; you with pyning mourne. 

The sovereigne of seas he blames in vaine, 
That, once sea-heaXe, will to sea againe. 

The style of Fuller is marked by the frequent recurrence of 
euphuistic expressions, but the exuberance of wit and humor, 
which overflows even the gravest works of a writer, whose amaz- 
ing affluence of thought and imagination makes him one of the 
most valuable as well as entertaining of our old authors, leads us 
often to suspect a smile under the fanciful rhetoric of his most 
serious exhortations. 

It is to the comparative rarity of similar sounds, which in lan- 
guages with terminal inflections are forced upon the ear to satiety, 
that we are to ascribe the love of every species of consonance, 
which at one time or another has marked the literature of all the 
nations of Northern Europe. The passion for alliteration and 
rhyme is common to the Germans, the Scandinavians, and the 
Anglican family, and the French are scarcely less fond than our- 
selves of puns, charades, and conundrums ; while in Italy, where 
the inflections are much more numerous, no species of verbal wit 
is so much in vogue. The sermons of Abraham a Santa Clara are 
remarkable for their incessant use of alliteration, assonance, and 
consonance, and though of a later date than the events which 



Lect. xxv.] burger's lenore. 487 

form the subject of Schiller's great drama, are said to have served 
as the model for the Capuchin sermon in Wallenstein's Lager, of 
which a very felicitous translation will be found in an early num- 
ber of the Foreign Review. 

The employment of imitative words, measures, and cadences, 
in poetry, naturally connects itself with the subject we are con- 
sidering. The ancient writers present many supposed examples 
of this ornament and adjunct to expression, but our great igno- 
rance of the pronunciation of the classic languages, especially the 
Greek, exposes us to much risk of error in pronouncing on the 
resemblance between the sound and the sense. I cannot discuss 
this branch of the subject on the present occasion, and I shall con- 
fine myself to the use of purely imitative words. The employment 
of these in modern literature has generally been restricted to pop- 
ular and romantic poetry, and in this they have been introduced 
with great success. The best examples I can call to mind are 
Burger's Lenore, and the very fine translation of it by Taylor. 
In neither of these is the imitation overcharged, or carried beyond 
what we might expect to hear in a simple, but spirited and pic- 
turesque oral narrative of the scenes described in the poem. The 
translation does not in all points come up to the felicity of the 
original, but in some passages it surpasses it. Thus : 

She herde a knight with clank alight, 
And clinibe the stair with speed, 

is very good, but 

And soon she heard a tinkling hand 
That twirled at the pin, 

is quite inferior to the 

Ganz lose, leise, klinglingling, 

of the original, while 

He cracked his whyppe ; the locks, the bolts, 
Cling-clang asunder flew, 

is not inferior to Burger's very best lines. In fact, both poems 
are examples of remarkable skill in the use of mere sound as an 
accompaniment and intensive of sense. I know, however, in the 



488 WEAKNESS OF RHYME. [Lect. xxv. 

whole range of imitative verse, no line superior, perhaps I should 
say none equal, to that in Wild's celebrated nameless poem : 

Yet as if grieving to efface 

All vestige of the human race, 

On that lone shore loud moans the sea. 

Here the employment of monosyllables, of long vowels and of 
liquids, without harsh consonantal sounds, together with the sig- 
nificance of the words themselves, gives to the verse a force of 
expression seldom if ever surpassed. 

The present literature of most European nations, certainly of 
the English and the Anglo-American people, exhibits abundant 
tokens of a satiety of hackneyed rhymes and stereotyped forms, 
and it is a question of much practical interest, how far it is pos- 
sible to find available substitutes or equivalents for them. It is 
certainly desirable that some check should be put upon the pro- 
pensity to rebel against all the restraints, and to overleap all the 
metrical canons of modern poetry, but it is impossible to deter- 
mine beforehand whether the substitution of assonance and half- 
rhyme would be allowable or advantageous. We do not now 
readily seize so vague resemblances of sound, but it seems not 
improbable that our ear might be trained to perceive and enjoy 
them, and in our weariness of f amiliar forms, the experiment is 
certainly worth trying. 



LECTUKE XXYI. 

SYNONYMS AND EUPHEMISMS. 

Webster's definition of synonym is as follows : " A noun or 
other word having the same signification as another is its syno- 
nym. Two words containing the same idea are synonymsP If 
this be a true definition, the French c h e v a 1 and the English horse 
are synonyms of each other, because the one has " the same sig- 
nification " as the other. Again, the verb to fear, the noun 
fear, the adjectives fearful and fearless, and the adverb fear- 
fully are synonyms, each of all the others, because they all " con- 
tain the same idea." The definition is manifestly erroneous in 
both its parts. C h e v a 1 and horse are reciprocally translations, 
not synonyms, of each other ; and as to the other example I have 
cited, it is a violation of the established use of the word to apply 
the term synonym to words of different grammatical classes, for 
synonyms are necessarily convertible, which different parts of 
speech cannot be. Synonym, in the singular number, hardly admits 
of an independent definition, for the notion of synonymy implies 
two correlative words, and therefore, though there are synonyms, 
there is in strictness no such thing as a synonym, absolutely taken. 
Properly defined, synonyms are words of the same language and 
the same grammatical class, identical in meaning ; or, more gen- 
erally, synonyms are words of the same language which are the 
precise equivalents of each other. And if a definition of the 
word in the singular be insisted on, we may say that a noun or 
other part of speech, identical in meaning with another word of 
the same language and the same grammatical class, is the syno- 
nym of that word; or, less specifically, a synonym is a word 
identical in meaning with another word of the same language 
and the same grammatical class. But though this is the proper 
definition of true synonyms, it is by no means the ordinary use 
21* (489) 



490 SYNONYMS DEFINED. [Lect. xxyi. 

of the term, winch, is generally applied to words not identical 
but similar, in meaning. Both in popular literary acceptation, 
and as employed in special dictionaries of such words, synonyms 
are words sufficiently alike in general signification to be liable to 
be confounded, but yet so different in special definition as to re- 
quire to be distinguished. 

It has been denied that synonyms have any real existence in 
human speech, and critical writers have affirmed, that between 
two words of similar general signification some shade of differ- 
ence in meaning is always discernible. Persons who think, and 
therefore speak, accurately, do indeed seldom use any two words 
in precisely the same sense, and with respect to words which do 
not admit of rigorously scientific definition as terms of art, and 
which are neither names of sensuous objects nor expressive of 
those primary ideas which are essential to, if not constitutive of, 
the moral and intellectual nature of man, it is almost, equally true 
that no two persons use any one word in exactly the same signifi- 
cation. Every man's conception of the true meaning of words is 
modified, both in kind and in degree, by the idiosyncrasies of his 
mental constitution. Language, as a medium of thought and an 
instrument for the expression of thought, is subjective, not abso- 
lute. ¥e mould words into conformity with the organization of 
our inner man ; and though different persons might, under the 
same circumstances, use the same words, and even define them in 
the same terms, yet the ideas represented by those words are more 
or less differenced by the mental characters and conditions of 
those who employ them. Hence, with the exceptions already 
made, all determinations of coincidence in, and distinction be- 
tween, the meanings of words, are approximate only, and there 
is always an uncertain quantity which cannot be eliminated. 

Besides this inherent difficulty common to all languages, there 
is the further fact, that in tongues of considerable territorial ex- 
tension, there are often local differences of usage ; so that of two 
words of like meaning, one will be exclusively employed in one 
district, the other in another, to express precisely the same idea. 

Again, the unpleasant effect of constant repetition often obliges 
both speakers and writers to employ different words for the same 
purpose.* For instance, in this course of lectures, I must, to 

* With foreigners, the employment of words or phrases not precisely ex- 



Lect. xxvi.] WOEDS SUBJECTIVE. 491 

vary the phrase and avoid wearisome iteration of the same word, 
use language, tongue, speech, words, dialect, idiom, discourse, 
vocabulary, nomenclature, phraseology, often, indeed, in differ- 
ent acceptations, but frequently to convey the same thought. 
For the same reason, one word is often figuratively used as an 
equivalent of another very different in its proper signification. 
Thus the wealthy English man employs gold, the less affluent and 
commercial French man silver, and the still poorer old Roman 
brass, as synonyms of money. 

There are, moreover, words not distinguishable in definition, 
but employed under different circumstances. Of this character 
are many words which occur only in the poetic dialect, and 
in the ambitious style of writing called ' sensation ' prose. These 
in some languages, as in Icelandic for example, are so numerous 
as to make the poetic and the prose vocabularies very widely dis- 
tinct. Of this class are blade, brand, and falchion, for sword / 
dame, damsel, maiden, for woman or girl / steed, courser, charger, 

pressing the idea they wish to convey, often arises from the difficulty of call- 
ing up on the instant the exact formula they are in search of, and, conse- 
quently, they are forced to content themselves with some very inadequate 
equivalent. Many years since, a foreign lady, who had never before been in 
a country where English was vernacular, spent some days in my family imme- 
diately after her arrival in the United States. I found her English remarkably 
good, and complimented her ready command of the language. "Ah !" re- 
plied she, "you think I speak it well because I use it fluently and grammati- 
cally ; but, after all, I assure you, I can never say in English precisely what I 
mean." 

Another difficulty in expressing one's self correctly in a foreign tongue arises 
from the fact that a word or phrase derived from a common source and liter- 
ally translatable into another speech, may convey, when so translated, a total- 
ly different idea from that intended. For instance, we say in English that a 
man is housed when he has a comfortable habitation, or, colloquially, when he 
is temporarily confined to the house. Were we to attempt to translate this idea 
literally into Italian or Spanish, and say that a man was casato or casado, we 
should convey a very different notion — namely, that he was married. In 
French the sense might be still different : La plus belle rue que je croy qui 
soit en tout le monde, est la mieux maisonnee. — P. de Comines : chap, xviii., 
p. 1404. 

Then again, a word may have become vulgar in one language while it re- 
tains its dignity in another, as for instance while we may still say to ape, with 
the Italian (scimiottare) we hesitate somewhat to follow him with to hound, to 
dog, (accannare, accaneggiare,) both which words are freely used in Italy in 
the most refined conversation. 



492 POETICAL AND FIGURATIVE WORDS. [Lect. xxvi. 

palfrey, for horse / and there are also, in most languages, many 
words peculiar to the sacred style or language of religion, but still 
having exact equivalents, the use of which is restricted to secular 
purposes. In general, words consecrated to religious and poeti- 
cal uses, are either native terms, which in the speech of common 
life have been supplanted by alien ones, or they belong to foreign 
tongues, and have been introduced with foreign forms of poetical 
composition or with foreign religious instruction. 

Nations much inclined to the figurative or metaphorical style, 
have usually numerous words synonymous in their use though 
etymologically of different signification. Thus, the Arabic has a 
large number of names for the lion, and not fewer for the sword. 
The figurative dialect of the Icelanders is also extremely rich. 
Snorro's Edda enumerates an hundred and fifty synonyms for 
' sword,' and a proportionate number for almost every other ob- 
ject which could be important in the poetic vocabulary. In such 
a profuse nomenclature as that of the Arabic and the Icelandic, a 
large proportion of the words were originally descriptive epithets, 
drawn from some quality or use of the object to which they are 
applied, and at other times they are taken from some incident in 
the popular mythology of the countries where they are employed. 
Our own brand, which occurs also in Icelandic and Norman 
French poetry as a name of the sword, is probably from the root 
of to bum, and refers to the flaming appearance of a well-polished 
blade. Other names are derived from the cutting properties of 
the edge, from the form of the blade, from the metal of which it 
was forged, and so of all its material qualities. These, of course, 
once conveyed distinct meanings, but in many instances the ety- 
mology, though known to the learned, was popularly forgotten, 
and thus these different words came at last to be, in common use, 
exact equivalents the one of the other. 

In composite languages like the English, there often occur 
words derived from different sources, which, though distinguished 
in use, are absolutely synonymous in meaning. For example, we 
have globe from the Latin, sphere from the Greek. The one is 
fairly translated by the other, and they are identical in significa- 
tion, inasmuch as all that can be truly affirmed of the one is true 
also of the other ; but they differ in use, and therefore we cannot 
always employ them interchangeably, sphere belonging rather to 



Lect. xxvi.] EUPHEMISM. 493 

scientific and poetical, globe to popular language. Allied to both 
these, and often confounded with, or substituted for them, is orb, 
from the Latin o r b i s . This word originally signified a circle, 
then a flat object limited by a circular boundary, and it was ap- 
plied both to the fellies of wheels and to wheels cut out of solid 
timber without spokes, as they often are at this day in the East. 
Then it was transferred to the sun and moon, which present to 
the eye a plane surface bounded by a circle, or what we generally 
call a disc, from the Greek and Latin discus, a quoit, whence 
also possibly our word dish, and even the German T i s c h , or 
table, from general resemblance of form. But when it was dis- 
covered that the sun and moon were not discs, but spheres, the 
word orb assumed the meaning of globe, and afterwards was ex- 
tended in signification so as to embrace the hollow spheres of an- 
cient astronomy. At present, though not susceptible of rigor- 
ously exact definition, orb is not distinguishable in sense from 
either globe or sphere, though its use is chiefly confined to poeti- 
cal composition. We have, then, a group of three words, sphere, 
globe, orb, properly synonymous, and we may add to them the 
word ball, as differing from the others only in being more loosely 
employed.* 

Out of difference of use with identity of signification grows 
what is called euphemism in language, or the substitution of re- 
fined or inoffensive words for gross or irritating ones, to convey 
precisely the same idea. It is difficult to understand how, of two 
words or phrases precisely alike in meaning, one may be freely 
used under circumstances where the employment of the other 
would be considered a flagrant violation of the laws of decorum ; f 

* It is remarkable that not one of these words belongs to the Gothic family 
•of languages, and, in fact, we have borrowed almost all our terms precisely 
descriptive of form from Romance sources. Bound, square, circle, cube, angle, 
line, surface, curve, all these are of Latin etymology, and our claim even to 
straight and flat, as native words, is matter of dispute. Source (from L. surgens, 
through O. F. sorse) and spring (from A. S. springan) are generally used as 
synonyms, though in some cases we should employ the one where we would 
not use the other. A fertile source, though a very common phrase, is certain- 
ly a false metaphor ; a fertile spring is more picturesque, but, unhappily, it is 
equivocal. 

f Plutarch (see Davanzati, vol. 1, Pref. xxxiii.) says that the people of 
Pallene would not use the cry atcoere Xeu ! after Aeug had betrayed them. The 
Sienese said habitually chello (quello) for nine, from hatred to the tyrannical 



494 EUPHEMISM. [Lect. xxvi. 

but it is probably to be explained partly on the principle of asso- 
ciation, which makes repulsive images doubly offensive, when 
they are suggested by words habitually employed by the vulgar 
and the vile, and strips them of half their grossness, when they 
are recalled by terms which have not yet been incorporated into 
the dialect of social debasement and of vice. The composite 
structure of English, giving us a double vocabulary, has supplied 
us with a larger stock of relatively euphemistic and vulgar ex- 
pressions than most languages possess, and it will generally be 
found that the Latin and French elements have furnished the 
words which are least offensive, probably because they are least 
familiar, and to our ears least expressive. In the greater or less 
degree of that familiarity which, as the old proverb says, " breeds 
contempt," we find the true explanation of the different impres- 
sion produced by vulgar and by euphemistic words of the same 
meaning. And it is for the same reason that coarseness of 
thought or of diction, in the literature of languages in which we 
are not entirely at home, is a less repulsive, and therefore, per- 
haps, a more dangerous source of corruption. The frequent and 
ostentatious use of euphemistic expressions, however disagreeable 
as an affectation — arising as often from a conscious grossness of 
mind only made more conspicuous by its awkward efforts to con- 
ceal itself, as from an honest fastidiousness — is, notwithstanding, 
less offensive than the contrary vice (for it deserves no milder 
name) of clothing the sacredest ideas, and communicating the 
most solemn facts, in the vocabulary of what, for want of a fitter 
word, we are obliged to designate as slang. .Narrative and dra- 
matic fiction have in our times gone great lengths in the employ- 
ment of this dialect, and certain popular writers have unfortu- 
nately succeeded in making many words belonging to it almost 
classical, but there are few things more certainly fatal to habits 
both of propriety of speech and of delicacy and refinement of 

magistracy of Monte dei Wove. Varolii, vol. 1, pp. 445-50, ed. Firenze 1845 : 
According to the unhappy John Davidson, the people of Morocco, from some 
superstition, in addressing the Sultan always said 3+2 instead of 5. Many 
tribes of the American Indians coin a new name for an object, when a mem- 
ber of the tribe on whom the original name of that object has been bestowed 
happens to die ; e. g., if a chief who has been surnamed " The Bear" dies, 
that animal heDceforth receives a new appellation. 



Lect. xxyi.] AFFIKMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PAETICLES. 495 

thought, thau indulgence in so reprehensible a practice. True it 
is, the source of growth in language is in the people, but this 
source, unhappily, is not a "well of English unclefiled," and 
though the popular mint yet strikes some coin of sterling gold, 
the majority of its issues are of a baser metal. 

There is another large class of words which are used indiffer- 
ently, not because they express precisely the same ideas, but be- 
cause they do not express any clearly definable ideas at all. Such 
are most terms of abuse and vituperation, which generally serve 
rather to convey an impression of the speaker's moral status, than 
a distinct notion of the exact character and degree of depravity 
he imputes to the subject of his discourse.* This consideration 
suggests the duty, or at least the expediency, of extreme reserve 
in the use of words which give the hearer to understand, not that 
we have cause to believe the supposed offender to be guilty of 
any specific violation of the laws of God or man, but that we are 
ourselves in a frame of mind which a 1 most necessarily involves 
some sacrifice of self-respect, some disregard of that charity 
which the obligations of both religion and society require us to 
show towards our fellow-man. 

De Quincey has said, and Trench quotes and approves the pas- 
sage, that " all languages tend to clear themselves of synonyms 
as intellectual culture advances — the superfluous words being taken 
up and appropriated by new shades and combinations of thought 
evolved in the progress of society." De Quincey is here speak- 
ing of words strictly synonymous, not of those generally called 
synonyms, but which are distinguishable both in meaning and in 
use. The remark might have been made more comprehensive, 
with equal truth, for there is a manifest inclination in modern 
languages to clear themselves not only of synonyms, but of all 

* See Paul Louis Courier, Seconde Lettre Particuliere. II m'appelle jacobin, 
revolutionnaire, plagiaire, voleicr, empoisonneur, faussaire, pestifere, ou pesti- 
fere, enrage, imposteur, calomniateur, libelliste, homme horrible, ordurier, 
grimacier, chiffonnier. * * * Je vois ce qu'il veut dire ; il entend que lui et 
moi sommes d'avis different. And again elsewhere : Un homme vous accuse 
d'avoir tue pere et mere, on sait ce que cela vent dire. C'est qu'il ne vous 
aime pas. 

Vague terms of abuse, as scoundrel, rascal, rogue, villain, have no feminine 
form or applicability. The derogatory epithets bestowed on women are 
specific. 



496 AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. [Lect. xxvi. 

superfluous niceties of expression, and to this tendency we may in 
part ascribe the rejection of inflections in grammar, in cases where 
the meaning is sufficiently plain without them. 

There is an example of the rejection of a needless subtlety in 
the case of our affirmative particles, yea and yes, nay and no, 
which were formerly distinguished in use, as the two affirmatives 
still are in our sister-tongues, the Danish and Swedish. The dis- 
tinction was that yea and nay were answers to questions framed 
in the affirmative / as, Will he go ? Yea, or Nay. But if the 
question was framed in the negative, Will he not go ? the answer 
was Yes, or Wo. In Danish and Swedish the distinction is lim- 
ited to the affirmative particles, and the negative form shows no 
trace of it. Thus to the question Will he go ? the affirmative an- 
swer is Ja f to the question Will he not go % the affirmative an- 
swer is Jo, while Wei, or in the Swedish orthography, Wej, is the 
negative answer to both.* 



* Although there are traces of these distinctions in Anglo-Saxon, I find no 
evidence that they were observed in Mceso-Gothic, and they were certainly 
unknown in Old-Northern, though modem Icelandic has recently borrowed 
from the Danish the particle jo, (j u ,) as the affirmative answer to a negative 
question. 

In Mceso-Gothic, there are two forms of the affirmative particle. In Mat- 
thew, v. 37, in the command, "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; 
Nay, nay " ; Ulphilas has Ja, ja, Ne, ne: but in Matth. ix. 28, Matth. xi. 
9, John xi. 27, and Luke vii. 26, where the query is in the affirmative form, 
and in Mark vii. 28, where the particle is intensive merely, no question pre- 
ceding, j a i is used. The only form of the negative particle no found in Ul- 
philas is ne, (ni and nih, signifying, not, neither, nor,) but in the existing 
remains of the Mceso-Gothic scriptures, but one case, John xviii. 25, occurs of 
a direct affirmative or negative reply to a negative question. The other pas- 
sages of the Gospels which contain such forms, as, Matth. xviii. 25, and John 
viii. 10, are wanting. 

In the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, John xxi. 15, 16, where the questions are put 
affirmatively, the answer is g e a ; in Matth. xvii. 25, to a negative question the 
answer is gy se. In Luke xii. 51, xiii. 5, to affirmative questions, the negative 
answer is n e ; in John xxi. 5, and Matth. xiii. 29, the answer is n e s e ; in 
John i. 21, and John xviii. 17, again nic. In John viii. 10, a negative ques- 
tion is answered negatively na, in John ix. 9, nese ; and in Luke xiii. 3, an 
affirmative question is answered negatively, Ne, secge ic, na, two forms 
being employed. In Aelfric's Homily on Pentecost day, (Homilies of Aelfric 
i. 316,) in the reply of Sapphira, quoted from Acts v. 8, g e a is the affirmative 
answer to an affirmative question. In the Saxon chronicle, An. MLXVII., 
Ingram's edition, p. 267, i a (g e a) is the reply to an earnestly repeated request. 



Lect. xxvi.] AFEIEMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. 497 

Tliese distinctions seem to be refinements belonging to the 
period when all the modern European languages showed a living 
nisus formativus, a tendency to the development of new and 
original forms. The etymological ground of this subtlety has not 
been satisfactorily made out, and though there is no doubt that it 
originally rested, if not on a logical, yet at least on a grammatical 
foundation, it had, at the earliest period to which we can trace it 
back, become a mere verbal nicety wholly independent of the 
point of view from which the question was regarded by the 
speaker, and therefore adding nothing to the force or clearness of 
expression. A subtlety like this, a distinction in words which 
suggests no difference of thought, was repugnant to the linguistic 
sense of an intellectual and at the same time practical people, and 
it therefore did not long survive the general diffusion of literary 
culture among the English nation. It may be doubted whether 

In Alfred's Boethius, c. xvi. § iv., and in c. xxxiv. § vi. gyse is the affirm- 
ative answer to negative questions ; and in six cases in c. xiv. § 1, xxiv. § 4, 
c. xxvi. § 1, c. xxvii. §2, nese, the negative reply to affirmative questions ; 
"but in c. xxiv. §4, nese answers negatively a question involving a negative. 
In Aelfrici Colloquium, Klipstein's Analecta, A.S.I, pp. 197, 198, and 203, we 
find affirmative questions affirmatively answered by gea, but on p. 199, gea 
is used for the same purpose with a question put negatively; and on p. 202, 
n i c occurs as the negative reply to an affirmative question. 

So far as these examples go, they, with a single exception, tend to prove that 
the distinction was made in the affirmative particle, but they show some vacil- 
lation in the use of the negative. I have examined Alfred's Orosius, the texts 
published by the Aelf ric Society, all the poems in Grein's Bibliothek der Angel- 
Sachsischen Poesie, all the selections in Klipstein's Analecta, and many minor 
pieces, besides the volumes above referred to, without finding any other ex- 
amples of the use of the particles as replies to direct questions, though there 
are many instances of the employment of both as intensives. 

Further search might probably lead to more decisive results, but the diffi- 
culty of investigating such points, without verbal indexes to the authors con- 
sulted, justifies me in leaving the question to grammatical inquirers. It may 
here be observed, that the want of complete verbal indexes to our classic authors 
is a very serious inconvenience in English philology. Even Cruden often 
omits the minor words which, in purely grammatical questions, are as im- 
portant as any. Mrs. Cowden Clarke's otherwise very valuable Concordance 
to Shakespeare is even more imperfect in this respect ; for instance, she cites 
several passages where sitJi is used, but since is not a word of reference in the 
Concordance, which, therefore, does not furnish the means of ascertaining 
whether Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, distinguished between these 
forms. 

Gil, who lived in Shakespeare's age, informs us that soon had lately acquired 



498 AFFIEMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PAETICLES. [Lect. xxvi. 

modern scholars would have detected the former existence of this 
obsolete nicety, if it had not been revealed to ns by Sir Thomas 
More's criticism npon Tyndale for neglecting it in his translation 
of the New Testament. That it was in truth- too subtle a dis- 
tinction for practice is shown by Sir Thomas More himself, for 
he misstates the rule when condemning Tyndale for the violation 
of it, and what is not less remarkable is the fact, that Home 
Tooke, Latham, (Eng. Lang., 2d ed., p. 528,) and Trench, (Study 
of Words, 156,) have all referred to or quoted More's observa- 
tions, without appearing to have noticed the discrepancy between 
the rule, as he states it, and his exemplification of it. The ques- 
tion is so curious in itself, and More's works are so rare in this 
country, that I shall be pardoned for quoting the whole passage 
relating to it. It will be found in " The Confutacyon of Tyndales 
Aunswere made anno 1532, by Syr Thomas More," page 448 of 



a peculiar sense. "QuiMi cito, siiner citior aut citius, siinest eitissimus aut 
citissim&, nam sun hodie apud plurimos significat ad primam vesperam, olim, 
cito." Log. Ang. 2d Ed. p. 34. Soon is not in Mrs. Clarke's Concordance, 
and therefore it does not help us in the inquiry, whether Shakespeare ever gave 
this meaning to that adverb. Is soon, in this sense, the same word, or of an- 
other etymology ? Minshew, under soone, refers to evening. In the Romaunt 
of the Rose, v. 21-24, we find this passage : 

Within my twentie yeare of age, 
When that love taketh his corage 
Of younge folke, I wente soone 
To bed, as I was wont to doone. 

Here soon evidently means early. 

The following examples have been furnished me by a friend : 

We'll have a posset f or't soon at night. 

Merry Wives of Windsor, I. 4. 

Come to me soon at night. Ibid. , II. 2. 



Soon at Jive o'clock. 
Please you, I will meet you upon the mart. 

Comedy of Errors, I. 2. 

And soon at supper time I'll visit you. 

Ibid., III. 2. 

But as you make your soon-at-nigM s relation, &c. 

B. Jonson, David is an Ass, I. 1. 

In all these cases, soon has the same meaning as in that cited from Chaucer. 



Lect. XXVI.] AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. 499 

the collected edition of More's works printed in 1557. The text 
criticized is John i. 21, as translated by Tyndale, which More 
quotes as follows : " And thei asked him, what then, art thou 
Helias ? And he sayd I am not. Arte thou a prophete ? And 
he aunswered, No." 

Upon this our author remarks : 

" 1 woulde here note by the way, that Tyndal here traslateth 
no for nay, for it is but a trifle and mistaking of ye Englishe 
worde ; sauing that ye shoulde see yt he why eh in two so plaine 
englishe wordes, and so commen as is naye and no, can not tell 
when he should take the tone and whe the tother, is not for tras- 
lating into englishe a man very meete. For the use of these two 
wordes in aunswering a question is this. No aunswereth the 
question framed by the affirmative. As for ensample, if a manne 
should aske Tindall hymself : ys an heretike mete to translate 
holy scripture into englishe ? Lo to thys question if he will 
aunswere trew englishe he must aunswere naye and not no. But 
and if the question be asked hym thus, lo ; Is not an heretyque 
mete to translate holy scripture into Englishe ? To thys questio 
lo if he wil auswere true englishe he must aiiswere no and not 
nay. And a lyke difference is there betwene these two aduerbes 
ye and yes. For if the question be framed unto Tindall by the 
affirmative in thys fashion ; If an heretique falsely translate the 
newe testament into englishe, to make hys false heresyes seeme ye 
worde of Godde, be hys books worthy to be burned ? To this 
question asked in thys wyse yf he will aunswere true englishe he 
must aunswere ye and not yes. But nowe if the question be asked 
hym thus lo by the negative ; If an heretike falsely translate the 
newe testament into Englishe, to make hys false heresyes seme 
the word of God, be not his bokes well worthy to be burned ? 
To thys question in thys fashion framed : if he wyll aunswere 
trew englyshe he may not aunswere ye, but he must aunswere 
yes, and say, yes mary be they bothe the translation and the trans- 
latour, and al that wyll holde wyth them." 

The first question supposed is in the affirmative form ; " Ys an 
heretike mete to translate holy scripture into Englishe ? " and if 
Sir Thomas is right in answering it by nay, as he unquestionably 
is, then his first rule, " No aunswereth the question framed by 
the affirmative," is wrong. Tooke calls this " a ridiculous dis- 



500 AFFIKMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PAETICLES. [Lect. xxvi. 

tinction," and evidently supposes that it was an invention of Sir 
Thomas himself. Later writers, also, have donbted whether there 
is any gronnd for believing that such a rule ever existed. It is, 
however, certain that the distinction was made, and very gener- 
ally observed, from the end of the fourteenth century to about 
the time of Tyndale and Sir Thomas More, soon after which it 
became obsolete.* 



* Yes (yuse) occurs in Layamon, (ii. 297,) in answer to a question affirma- 
tively framed, but still in a form implying disbelief, and thus may be consid- 
ered as following the rule. I believe yea and no are not found in that work, 
but nay is twice used as an intensive. In the Ormulum, I think there is no in- 
stance of a direct question with an answer by either particle. Yea and nay 
are the only forms given in Coleridge's Glossarial Index to the Literature of 
the thirteenth century, but I have not the means of consulting the authorities 
referred to. Yea is used by Robert of Gloucester, in answer to an affirmative 
question, and nay by him and Robert of Brunne, but I believe as an intensive 
only. I have not met with either yes or no, or indeed a proper case for the 
use of them, that is, a question put negatively and admitting a direct answer, 
in any English author earlier than WyclifCe and his contemporaries. In Piers 
Ploughman, yea and nay are found several times as answers to affirmative 
questions, and as intensives in other cases. No occurs in verse 8977 of the 
Vision, without a question preceding, and yes in verse 6750, under similar cir- 
cumstances. Yes is used in verses 2721 and 11963, in both cases according to 
the rule ; in verse 3776, as an intensive, in reply to a negative assertion ; and 
in verse 2937, contrary to the rule, as an answer to a query put affirmatively. 

Grower employs yea and yes, nay and no, almost indiscriminately, and of 
course without regard to the rule. 

WyclirTe, according to the Oxford edition of 1850, in Matthew xvii. 25, uses- 
yea, contrary to the rule, but the later text of the same passage has yes in con- 
formity to it. In Romans hi. 29, in both texts, yes conforms to the rule. In 
James v. 12, Wycliffe has yes, the later version yea. In Matth. v. 37, ix. 28, 
xi. 9, xiii. 29, 51, xv. 27, xxi. 16, Luke xii. 57, John i. 21, xi. 27, xxi. 5, 15, 
16, Acts v. 8, xxii. 27, Romans hi. 9, 28, yea and nay answer questions affirma- 
tively framed. I believe no does not occur in the Wycliffite versions of the 
New Testament as an adverb, the answer to the negative question in John 
viii. 10 being " no man." In John ix. 9, nay is used in both texts, apparently 
as an answer to a negative question, but this is a doubtful case, for the particle 
may perhaps be regarded as a contradiction to the affirmative answer of 
" othcre men." Hence it will be seen that though Wycliffe occasionally de- 
parts from the rule, the later, or Purvey's, text, with the doubtful exception 
just cited, uniformly adheres to it. In Chaucer, I find, upon a cursory exam- 
ination, fifty instances of the occurrence of yea, yes, nay, and no, and in these 
there is but a single case of disregard of the rule. In this example, nay an- 
swers an affirmative question, and there are two or three cases where yes is 
employed as an intensive, generally, however, in reply to remarks involving a 



Lect. xm.] SITH AND SITHE^TCE. 501 

Yes and no were usually, though not with absolute uniformity, 
limited to the office of answering a question negatively framed, 
while yea and nay served both as answers to affirmative ques- 
tions, and as intensives in reply to remarks not made interroga- 
tively. 

As this idle refinement was passing away, there arose a real, 
substantial distinction between two particles, or rather between 
two forms of the same particle, which had previously been used 
indiscriminately in two different senses. Down to the middle of 
the sixteenth century, and indeed somewhat later, sith, seththe, 
syth, sithe, sythe, sithen, sithan, sythan, sithenee, since, syns, and 
sens were indifferently employed, both in the signification of see- 
ing that, inasmuch as, considering, and of after or afterwards. 
About that period good authors established a distinction between 
the forms, and used sith only as a logical word, an illative, while 
sithenee and since, whether as prepositions or as adverbs, remained 
mere narrative words, confined to the signification of time after. 

It is evident, that although the former of these notions is a 

negative. ■ In a like number of examples in Mallorye's Morte d' Arthur, South- 
er's reprint, I find the distinction made with equal uniformity, and the ob- 
servance of the rule is very nearly constant in Lord Berners' Arthur of Little 
Britain, and in the Froissart of the same translator. It is in most cases fol- 
lowed in the works of Skelton, though in this latter writer's time, usage had 
begun to vacillate. I have examined many other authors with the like result, 
and think we may say that from the time of Chaucer to that of Tyndale, the 
distinction in question was as well established as any rule of English grammar 
whatever. See also Tyndale himself, Supper of the Lord, 1533, B. 1, 4a, 
no and nay, yea and yes. 

Sir Thomas More's criticism on Tyndale was not universally acquiesced in, 
for Coverdale, whose translation was printed in 1535, Cranmer in 1539, the 
Geneva in 1557, and the Khemish in 1582, as well as the authorized version in 
1611, all have Wo, in the text John i. 21. Indeed, I think Sir Thomas him- 
self was the last important author who followed the rule, though in the early 
part of his life, as is sufficiently shown by the works of Lord Berners, it was 
still in full vigor. 

A curious form of yes occurs in Wycliffe, N". T., 2 Cor. i. 18 : "Ther is 
not in it is and nay, but in it is is," [Gloss, that is, treuthe,] and verse 19 : 
" Ther was not in him is and nay, but in hym is was," [Gloss, that is, stede- 
fast treutlie.~] In the later text, these passages read : "is and is not is not 
ther ynne, but is is in it"; and, "ther was not in hym is and is not, but is 
was in hym." So in James, v. 12 : "Forsothe be your word, Is, is, Nay, 
nay," &c. The Wycliffite translators, or at least Purvey, seem to have sup- 
posed that the affirmative particle was a form of the substantive verb. 



502 SITH AND SITHENCE. [Lect. xxyi. 

derivative, the latter a primitive sense, they are nevertheless dis- 
tinct, and it is very desirable to be able to discriminate between them 
by appropriate words. The radical is f onnd in a great number of 
forms in Anglo-Saxon and the related languages, and in all of 
them has primarily the sense of time after. But the conclusion 
is always posterior to the reason, and post hoc, ergo propter hoc 
is the universal expression of all that the human intellect 
knows concerning the relation of cause and effect. Hence, it 
was very natural that a word implying historical sequence should 
acquire the sense of logical consequence. The discrimination be- 
tween the two meanings, and the appropriation of a separate 
form to each, originated in the subtle, metaphysical turn of mind 
which characterized the fathers of the Reformation in England, 
nor have I, upon an examination of the works of numerous 
writers of earlier periods, been able to find one who clearly dis- 
tinguishes the two senses by the use of different forms. Some 
authors employ for both purposes sith alone, some sithen or sith- 
ence, others sens or syns, and others, again, two or more of these 
modes of spelling. The fullest, most uniform, and most satisfac- 
tory exemplifications of the discrimination will be found in 
Spenser, who seldom neglects it, Sylvester the translator of Du 
Bartas, and Hooker. All these writers belong to the later half of 
the sixteenth century, immediately after which all the forms of 
the word except since went out of use, and of course the distinc- 
tion, which "seemed to have become well established, perished, 
with them. The English Bible of 1611 generally employs since 
for both purposes, but it is a curious fact that in the book of 
Jeremiah both forms are used, and in every instance accurately 
discriminated. The disappearance of the double form and double 
sense of the word was very sudden, for though the distinction 
was observed, by writers as popular as any in the literature, down 
to the very end of the sixteenth century, yet in Minsheu's Guide 
into the Tongues, an English polyglot dictionary first published 
in 1616, since is the only form given for both senses, and sythan 
is simply referred to as " Old-English." * 

* I have not cited Shakespeare as an authority for the distinction in ques- 
tion, because, for want of an entirely satisfactory text, I find it impossible to 
determine whether he constantly observed it or not. Mrs. Clarke's Concord- 
ance does not inform us what edition was made the basis of her labors, but as 



Lect. xxyi.] equivocal paeticles. 503 

In speaking of the introduction of the neuter possessive its, on 
a former occasion, I observed that in the embarrassment between 
the new word and the incongruous use of his as a neuter, many 
writers for a considerable period employed neither form. There 
was a similar state of things with regard to sith and since at the 
beginning of the seventeenth century, and there are important 
English authors who systematically avoid them both. 

It is much to be regretted that later writers have disregarded 
a distinction logically so important. The restoration of sith, and 
with it of the distinction between sith and since, would be a sub- 
stantial benefit to the English language, and I have little doubt 
that a popular writer who should revive it would find himself 
sustained by the good sense of the Anglican people. 

Many of our particles, the conjunctions especially, are very 
equivocal in their signification, and we much need a new alter- 
native and a new conjunctive. The particle or is said by gram- 
marians to be used both as a conjunctive and as a disjunctive.* 



she occasionally cites different texts, I presume all those consulted by her agree 
upon this particular point. The Concordance gives sixteen examples of the use of 
sith, in all cases as an illative, but sithence occurs in All's Well that Ends Well, i. 3, 
in the same sense, as, according to Knight's text, does since, also, in Hamlet 
v. 2, Twelfth Night v. 1, twice, King Richard II. ii. 1, twice, do. sc. 2, Part 

1. K. Henry IV. v. 5, and Henry V. i. 1. Since is used for time after in Twelfth 
Night, v. 1, twice in All's Well that Ends Well, iii. 7, in Romeo and Juliet i. 

2, twice, and in As You Like It, v. 2. Many other examples of the use of since 
in both senses might be given ; and therefore it would appear that while Shake- 
speare used sith only as an illative, he employed since indifferently to express 
sequence and consequence. Perhaps a critical examination of the first editions 
might determine the question, and I think it highly probable that the double use 
of since is chargeable to the editors or printers, not to the author. 

* In modern English, either, used as a conjunction, is always a disjunctive, 
and is only grammatically distinguished from one of the senses of or ; but in 
some early English writers, as, for example, in the Wycliffite school cf trans- 
lators, there are traces of a logical distinction between these particles. Either 
was veiy commonly employed to indicate difference, alternation, opposition, 
and or to mark identity of meaning. Thus, in both texts, Col. i. 20, "tho 
thingis that ben in erthis, ether that ben in heuenes." In the numerous glosses 
of the older, or Wycliffe's version of the New Testament, or is employed as 
the sign of identity, or of likeness, as in v. 21 of the chapter just cited, 
"aliened, or maad straunge"; in v. 25, "mynistre, or seruaunt"; in v. 26, 
"the mysterie, orpriuete." This distinction is not uniformly observed by 
Wycliffe, but still so generally as to show that he recognized it. 



504: METAPHYSICAL DISTINCTIONS. [Lect. xxvi. 

The double sense of this word, which, may imply in one period 
that two objects or propositions are equivalent if not identical, in 
another, that they are unlike, diverse, incongruous, is a fertile 
source of equivocation in language, and it is very singular that 
the urgent want of two alternatives has not developed a new one, 
and restricted our uncertain or to a single meaning. The con- 
junction and is almost equally vague in signification. We find 
an exemplification of this in the case of " Stradling versus Stiles," 
where Pope, or Swift, or Arbuthnot, or perhaps all three, have 
illustrated the uncertainty of the law and of language by sup- 
posing a will, in which a testator, possessed of six black horses, 
six white horses and six pied, or black-<m<^-white, horses, be- 
queathed to A B " all my black and white horses," and thereupon 
raising the question, whether the bequest carried the black horses, 
and the white horses, or the black-and-white horses only. The 
equivocation here does not, indeed, lie wholly in the conjunction ; 
nevertheless, the use of a proper disjunctive particle, had such a 
one existed, would have prevented it. 

The loss of the short-lived distinction between sith and sithence 
or since, is an exception to the general tendency of English, 
which is towards the discrimination of similar shades of thought 
in logical, metaphysical, argumentative, and sesthetical language, 
and to the rejection of needless subtleties in the designation of 
material things. In proportion as we multiply distinctions be- 
tween intellectual functions and between moral states or their 
manifestations, and consequently multiply the words to express 
them, as we enlarge the nomenclature of criticism and subtilize 
the vocabulary of ethics and metaphysics, we incline to discard 
nice differences between terms properly belonging to material 
acts and objects, and to suffer words expressive of them to perish. 
An individual or a people earnestly occupied with serious studies, 
or other pursuits making large demands on the intellect, will 
habitually neglect the vocabulary of arts and occupations of a 
lower grade, and will disregard distinctions between the names of 
acts and things too trivial and insignificant to be susceptible of 
important differences. Few city counsellors, indeed, would now 
boast, with Lord Erskine, that they could not distinguish a field 
of lavender from a field of wheat :* but every man familiar 
* Cobbett, Treatise on Cobbett's Corn, p. 1. 



Lect. xxyi.] DISAPPEAEANCE OF SUBTILTIES. 505 

with country-life is aware that even farmers now confound in 
name many of the operations of rural economy, which were 
formerly distinguished by appropriate terms. The vocabulary 
of the field and the kitchen, except as it is enlarged by the in- 
troduction of new processes, new objects, and new subjects of 
thought and conversation, grows poor, as the dialect of the intel- 
lect and the conscience becomes more copious, comprehensive, 
and refined. I may exemplify what I mean by the word fetch, 
which, though still in use in England, is becoming less common 
in that country, and has grown almost wholly obsolete in many 
parts of the United States. Fetch properly includes the going 
in search of the object, and go, when used with it, is redundant, 
because it only expresses what fetch implies. Fetch is ahnost 
exactly equivalent to the German h o 1 e n , and, as is said of the 
latter word, he can only fetch a thing who goes purposely after 
it. Now the distinction between fetching that which we go ex- 
pressly to seek, and oringing that which we have at hand or pro- 
cure incidentally, is comparatively unimportant, and may well be 
disregarded as a thing of inferior moment Hence it is not often 
heard among us.* The distinction between carrying and oring- 
ing is more simple and obvious, and both words are accordingly 
retained, but there is a tendency to confound even these, and it 
is not improbable that one of them may go out of use. 

Thus far the disappearance of words indicative of insignificant 
distinctions, and which only tend to burden the memory with 
useless lumber, is not an evil to be deplored, but there were in 
Anglo-Saxon and in the Scandinavian sister-tongues, numerous 
words expressive of slight differences of structure or outline in 
the features of natural scenery, the decay of which is a loss both 
to poetical imagery and to precision of geographical nomenclature, 
though their places have been more or less adequately supplied 
by new terms of foreign importation. Some of these words still 
exist as proper names of particular localities, though no longer 
current as common nouns. The admirers of Wordsworth will 
remember two of them, which occur more than once in his poems, 

* We sometimes still say to fetch a sigh, and, in the slang dialect of auction- 
eers, a book or other article is said to have fetched such or such a price at 
such a sale. 

22 



506 SYNONYMS OF THE CHASE. [Lect. xxvi. 

as parts of local names, gil a rocky ravine, and fors or force a 
cascade or water-fall. It is a curious circumstance with regard 
to both of these words, that they are Old-Northern, and not met 
with in the extant remains of Anglo-Saxon literature, and hence 
they were probably applied to particular localities by the Danish 
invaders of England, and never understood as descriptive terms 
by the natives who adopted them. 

The largest class of duplicates of common words which has 
become obsolete is perhaps that of the technical terms of the 
chase. In the days of feudal power and splendor, hawking and 
hunting constituted the favorite recreation of the higher classes, 
and the importance attached to these sports, both as healthful 
amusements and as a half-military training, naturally led to the 
cultivation and enlargement of the vocabulary belonging to their 
exercise. The early English press teemed with treatises on the 
chase, and the book of St. Albans, first printed in 1486, is very 
full on the subject of the nomenclature of the gentle craft. 
From this and other works on the same subject, we learn that 
the nobler beasts and fowls of chase took different names for 
every year of their lives, until full maturity, as domestic animals 
still do to some extent in this country, but more especially in 
England, and that all the important parts, products, and functions 
of each of these animals had its peculiar designation not common 
to the corresponding part or act of other quadrupeds or birds. 
The habits of different creatures, and all the operations of the 
chase connected with each, had terms exclusively appropriated to 
the species, and even the art of carving changed its name with 
the game upon which it was exercised. Thus Dame Juliana 
Berners, the reputed author of the book of St. Albans, informs 
us that in gentle speech it is said " the hauke joukyth, not slep- 
eth ; she refourmeth her feelers, and not pyckyth her feders ; she 
rowsith, and not shaketh herselfe ; she mantellyih, and not 
stretchyth, when she puttyth her legges from her, one after a 
nother, and her wynges folowe her legges ; and when she hath 
mantylled her and bryngeth both her wynges togyder over her 
backe ; ye shall saye youre hawkye warbellyth her wynges." So, 
to designate companies, we must not use names of multitude pro- 
miscuously, but we are to say a congregacyon of people, a hoost 
of men, a felyshyjojpynge of yomen, and a levy of ladyes ; we 



Lect. xxvi.] SYNONYMS OF THE CHASE. 507 

must speak of a herde of dere, swannys, cranys, or wrenys, a 
sege of herons or bytourys, a muster of pecockes, a watche of 
nyghtyngales, a flyglite of doves, a claterynge of ckoughes, a 
pryde of lyons, a slewthe of beeres, a gagle of geys, a skulke of 
foxes, a senile of frerys, a pontiftcalitye of prestys, and a super- 
fluyte of nonnes, and so of other human and brute assemblages. 
In like manner, in dividing game at the table, the animals were 
not carved, but a dere was broken, a gose reryd, a chekyn 
frusshed, a cony unlaced, a crane dy splayed, a curlewe un- 
ioyntcd, a quayle wynggyd, a swanne lyfted, a lambe sholdered, 
a heron dysmembryd, a pecocke dysfygured, a samon chynyd, a 
hadoke sydyd, a sole loynyd and a breme splayed. The charac- 
teristic habits, traces, and other physical peculiarities of animals 
were discriminated in the language of the chase with equal pre- 
cision, and a strict observance of all these niceties of speech was 
more important as an indication of breeding, or in the words of 
Dame Juliana Berners, as a means of distinguishing " gentylmen 
from ungentylmen," than a rigorous conformity to the rules of 
grammar, or even to the moral law. 

The old romances ascribe the invention of the vocabulary of 
the chase to the famous Sir Tristram of the Round Table, and the 
Morte d' Arthur says : 

" Me semeth alle gentylmen that beren old armes oughte of 
ryght to honoure syre Trystram for the goodly termes that gen- 
tilmen have and use, and shalle to the daye of dome, that there 
by in a maner alle men of worship maye disscover a gentylman 
fro a yoman, and from a yoman a vylayne. For he that gentyl 
is wylle drawe hym unto gentil tatches, and to folowe the cus- 
tommes of noble gentylmen." 

That most of these words pointed originally to a real difference 
between the objects or the processes indicated by them, there is 
little doubt ; but the etymology of many of them is lost, and those 
not now retained in different or in more general applications, 
have become wholly obsolete, though some which have disap- 
peared from literature still exist in popular or provincial usage. 

The study of synonyms has always been regarded as one of the 
most valuable of intellectual disciplines, independently of its 
great importance as a guide to the right practical use of words. 
The habit of thorough investigation into the meaning of words, 



508 ENGLISH SYNONYMS. [Lect. xxvi. 

and of exact discrimination in the use of them, is indispensable to 
precision and accuracy of thought, and it is surprising how soon 
the process becomes spontaneous and almost mechanical and un- 
conscious, so that one often finds himself making nice, and yet 
sound, distinctions between particular words which he is not 
aware that he has ever made the subject of critical analysis. The 
subtle intellect of the Greeks was alive to the importance of this 
study, and we not only observe just discrimination in the employ- 
ment of language in their best writers, but we not unfrequently 
meet with discussions as to the precise signification of words, 
which show that their exact import had become a subject of 
thoughtful consideration before much attention had been bestowed 
upon grammatical forms. In a tongue in the main homogeneous 
and full of compounds and derivatives, the source of the word 
would naturally be first appealed to as the key to its interpreta- 
tion. Etymology is still an indispensable auxiliary to the study 
of synonyms ; but in a composite language like English, where 
the root-forms are inaccessible to the majority of those who use 
it, the primary signification of the radical does not operate as a 
conservative influence, as it did in Greece, by continually sug- 
gesting the meaning and thus keeping the derivative or com- 
pound true to its first vocation. Words with us incline to diverge 
from the radical meaning; and therefore etymology, though a 
very useful clew to the signification, is, at the same time, a very 
uncertain guide to the actual use, of words. And this is espe- 
cially true of what may be called secondary derivatives, or words 
formed by derivation or composition from forms themselves 
derivative or compound, or borrowed from foreign sources. The 
study of words of this class is one of the most difficult points of 
our synonymy ; and it is often a very puzzling question to decide 
why, for example, two substantives, allied in meaning, should be 
distinguished by one shade of signification, and the corresponding 
adjectives, which we have formed from them, by a totally differ- 
ent one. I objected to the latter part of Webster's definition of 
synonym, because, by applying that name to all words " contain- 
ing the same idea," it makes different parts of speech synonyms, 
which is contrary to establishsd usage. We have no term to 
designate words differing in etymology and in grammatical char- 
acter, but otherwise agreeing in meaning ; but to pairs of words 



Lect. xxyi.] ENGLISH SYNONYMS. 509 

derived from the same root, and differenced in meaning only by 
grammatical class, we apply the epithet conjugate, or, more rarely, 
that of paronymons. Strictly speaking, the ideas expressed by 
the two must be identical ; but, as they are more generally dis- 
tinguished by some slight difference of meaning, the term conju- 
gate is loosely used to express identity in etymology, with only 
general likeness of meaning, in words of different classes. Cost 
and costly, for example, are strictly conjugate ; faith and faith- 
ful, in some of then* senses, are exactly so, in others not ; while 
grief and grievous, polish of manner and politeness of manner, 
grace and gracious, pity and pitiful, as ordinarily used, express 
quite different ideas. The verb to affect has a number of dispar- 
ate uses in its different inflected forms and its derivatives. When 
it means to produce an effect upon, to influence, or to like, to 
have a partiality for, it has no conjugate noun ; for affection, in 
neither sense, exactly corresponds to the verb. Affect, to simu- 
late, to pretend, and affectation, are conjugate, although not gen- 
erally considered so, because most persons are not aware that the 
unnatural airs, called affectation, are really founded in hypocrisy, 
or false assumption. The participles and participial adjective 
affecting, touching, or exciting to sympathy or sorrow, and the 
passive form affected, have still another meaning, in which the act- 
ive verb is rarely employed. 

Few languages are richer than English in approximate synonyms 
and conjugates ; and it is much to be regretted that no competent 
scholar has yet devoted himself to the investigation of this branch 
of our philology. The little manual, edited by Archbishop 
TThately, containing scarcely more than four hundred words, is, 
so far as it goes, the most satisfactory treatise we have on the sub- 
ject." Crabbe's Synonyms, much used in this country, is valua- 

* The Saxon part of our vocabulary, partly from the inherent character of 
the class of ideas for the embodiment of which it is chiefly employed, and 
partly because of its superior expressiveness, is generally very free from 
equivocation, and its distinctions of meaning are usually clearly marked. The 
number of Anglo-Saxon words approximate to each other in signification is 
small, and the distinction between those liable to be confounded is grammati- 
cal more frequently than logical. In the Treatise on Synonyms, edited by 
TThately, something more than four hundred and fifty words are examined 
and discriminated, and of these less than ninety are Anglo-Saxon. The rela- 
tive proportions in Crabbe's much larger work are not widely different. 



510 ENGLISH SYNONYMS. [Lect. xxvi. 

ble chiefly for its exemplifications ; but the author's ignorance of 
etymology has led him into many errors ; * and it cannot pretend 
to compare with the many excellent works on the synonymy of 
the German, French, Danish, and other European languages. 
But in the increasing interest which the study of English is ex- 
citing, this, as well as other branches of lexicography, will doubt- 
less receive a degree of attention, which will contribute to give to 
the history of English a rank corresrjonding to the importance of 
that tongue, as one of the most powerful instruments of thought 
and action assigned by Providence to the service of man. 

f Exempli gratia, doze, (allied to the Anglo-Saxon, d w ae s , and the Danish 
verb, d o s e ,) we are informed, is a " variation from the French dors, and 
the Latin dormio, to sleep, which was anciently dermio, and comes 
from the Greek dap/ia, a skin, because people lay on skins when they slept ! " 
Crabbe, Syn. under sleep. With equal infelicity he derives daub from " do and 
u b , u b e r , over, signifying literally to do over with anything unseemly." 

It must, however, be admitted that, absurd as such derivations, and those 
already referred to. in a former lecture as given by Menage, appear, and as 
very many of them undoubtedly are, they are, after all, not more surprising 
than certain well-ascertained results of scientific etymology. What, for in- 
stance, can be, prima facie, more incredible than that the Greek Sanpv, the French 
larme, and the English tear, are not merely related, but are only different 
forms of a single word. Yet no linguist doubts the identity of the three so dif- 
ferent vocables. 



LECTUKE XXYII. 

TRANSLATION. 

The study of synonymy, or the discrimination between ver- 
nacular words allied in signification, and that of etymology, or 
the comparison of derivative words with their primitives, naturally 
suggest the inquiry how far there is an exact correspondence of 
meaning between the native vocabulary and that of foreign 
tongues, or, in other words, whether a poem, a narrative, or a 
discussion, composed in one language can be precisely rendered 
into another. If we may trust the dictionaries, almost every Eng- 
lish word has synonyms in the speech to which it belongs, and 
equivalents in every other ; but a more critical study of language, 
as actually employed, teaches us, first, that true synonyms are 
everywhere of rare occurrence, and secondly that, with the ex- 
ception of the names of material objects and of material acts, there 
is seldom a precise coincidence in meaning between any two 
words in different languages. Even the sensuous perceptions of 
men are not absolutely identical, but they nevertheless so far con- 
cur, that we may consider the names given in different countries 
to things cognizable by the senses as equivalent to each other, 
though the epithets by which the objects are characterized, and 
the qualities ascribed to them, may differ. But the moment we 
step out of the domain of the senses, and begin to apply to acts 
and objects belonging to the world of mind, names derived from 
the world of matter, we diverge from each other, and every nation 
forms a vocabulary suited to its own moral and intellectual char- 
acter, its circumstances, habits, tastes, and opinions, but not pre- 
cisely adapted to the expression of the conceptions, emotions, and 
passions of any other people. Hence the difficulty of making 
translations which are absolutely faithful re-productions of their 
originals. 

(511) 



512 FREQUENCY OF TRANSLATIONS. [Lect. xxvh. 

There are at the present day conflicting influences in operation 
which tend, on the one hand, to individualize the languages of 
Europe and make them more idiomatic aud discordant in struc- 
ture, and on the other, to harmonize and assimilate them to each 
other; and the same influences are acting respectively as hin- 
drances and as helps to the making of translations between them. 
To the latter, the helps, belong the increased facilities of com- 
munication, the general study, in every country, of the literature 
of several others, the influence of two or three cosmopolite lan- 
guages, like English, French, and German, the extended cultiva- 
tion of philological science, and the universality of the practice of 
translation, which has compelled scholars to find or fashion, in 
their own speech, equivalents, or at least exponents, of the idioms 
of all others. # The Caledonian, indeed, does not believe that the 
novels of Scott can be adequately translated into any foreign 
tongue ; the German affirms that Kichter is to be understood and 
enjoyed only in the original Teutonic ; and the American doubts 
whether the Libyan English of Uncle Tom's Cabin can be ren- 
dered into any other dialect. Nevertheless, each of these has had 
numerous translations whose success proves that they are tolerable 
representatives, if not exact counterparts, of their originals. 

The opposing influence is the spirit of nationality and linguistic 
purism, which has revived so many dying, and purged and reno- 
vated so many decayed and corrupted, European languages within 
the last century. In almost every Continental country, foreign 
words and phrases have been expelled, and their places supplied 
by native derivatives, compounds, and constructions; obsolete 
words have been restored, vague and anomalous orthography con- 
formed to etymology or to orthoepy, and thus both the outward 
dress and the essential spirit of each made more national and idi- 
omatic, and, therefore, to some extent, more diverse from all 
others, and less capable of being adequately rendered into any of 
them. At the same time, the purification and reconstruction of 
languages have brought them all back to certain principles of 
universal, or rather of Indo-European, grammar common to all, 
and in each, the revival of forgotten words and idioms has so en- 
larged their vocabulary, and increased their compass and flexibil- 
ity, that it is easier to find equivalents for foreign terms and con- 
structions, than when their stock of words and variety of expres- 



Lect. xxvn.] FEEE AND LITERAL TRANSLATION. 513 

sion were more restricted. Upon the whole, then, better transla- 
tions are now practicable than at any former period of literary 
history ; and every popular author may hope to see his works re- 
peated in many forms, none of which he need be ashamed to own 
as his offspring. 

The question between the relative merits of free and literal 
translation, between paraphrastic liberty and servile fidelity, has 
been long discussed ; but, like many other abstract questions, it 
depends for its answer upon ever-varying conditions, and there is 
no general formula to express its solution. The commentators on 
the famous Horatian precept : 

Nee verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus 
Interpres, 

might have saved themselves some trouble, if they had observed, 
what is plain from the context, that Horace was not speaking of 
translation at all, but of theatrical adaptation, dramatization, as 
we now say, of epic or historical subjects which had been already 
treated in narrative prose or verse by other writers ; and, there- 
fore, the opinion of the great Roman poet, were it otherwise 
binding, could not be cited as an authority on this question.* 

* Much of modern opinion on ancient literature and philosophy is founded 
on the criticism of familiar quotations, the examination of detached passages, 
which, standing alone, appear to contain a very different meaning from that 
which they express when taken in connection with their context, or the cir- 
cumstances under which they were uttered. An example of this is the senti- 
ment in Cicero's Tusculan Questions, I. 17, so often quoted and moralized 
upon as an instance of excessive and almost idolatrous reverence for a majestic 
and imposing human intellect : "Errare mehercule malo cum Platone * * * 
quam cum istis vera sentire." Even in the Guesses at Truth, second series, 
third edition, p. 235, this passage is treated as the expression of a humiliating 
general submission to the authority of Plato, and Cicero is in part exonerated 
from the disgrace of so unworthy a sentiment, by the remark that he puts the 
words into the mouth of "the young man whom he is instructing," though it 
is admitted that he approved and adopted them. But it is plain to any one 
who will take the trouble to read enough of the dialogue in which this passage 
occurs, to understand the bearing of it upon the subject under discussion, that 
the "young man" expressed, and Cicero approved, no such deference to the 
authority of the Greek philosopher as is, upon the strength of this quotation, 
so often imputed to Cicero himself. The immediate point then under discus- 
sion was the question of the immortality of the soul, which was maintained by 
Plato, but denied by the Epicureans, and it is, evidently, solely with reference 
22* 



514 FKEE AND LITERAL TRANSLATION, [Lect. xxvn. 

The rule of Hooker : " Of translations, the better I acknowledge 
that, which cometh nearer to the very letter of the very original 
verity," is equivocal, because it is not certain, whether " original 
verity" means ' original sense? which most would approve, or 
' original words? which most would condemn, for the reason that 
the idiomatic differences between different languages would often 
make a literal translation of the several words of a foreign author 
unintelligible nonsense. Fuller, with his usual quaint felicity, has 
well expressed the common loose theory by a simile. Speaking 
of Sandys, whose admirable scriptural paraphrases ought to be 
better known than they are, he says, " He was a servant, but no 
slave, to his subject ; well knowing that a translator is a person 
[prisoner ?] in free custody ; custody, being bound to give the 
true sense of the author he translates; free, left at liberty to 
clothe it in his own expression." * 



to the conclusions of Plato on this one point, not the general weight of his 
authority, that the disciple and his master agree in preferring to share with 
him the beneficent possible error of eternal life, rather than the fearful and 
pernicious truth, if it were a truth, of final annihilation, with his opponents. 

And how comes it, that among the thousands of rhetorical critics, who, since 
Cicero and Quintilian, have speculated on the answer of Demosthenes, 
vTronpicic, Delivery, Delivery, Delivery ! so few have ever adverted to the 
opinion of Libanius, that this reply was an ironical side-thrust at iEschines ; 
an opinion which, if we are to interpret Demosthenes by himself, is rendered 
highly probable by the contemptuous sneers of the great orator at the dya^i] 
vironptotg of his rival, the special point of excellence in which he was himself 
confessedly inferior to iEschines ? 

* Very judicious observations on the principles of translation will be found 
in Purvey's Prologue to his Translation of the Scriptures, (about A.D. 1388,) 
Wycliffite versions, I. 57. The general doctrine of Purvey is thus stated : 
" First it is to knowe, that the best translating is, out of Latyn into English, 
to translate aftir the sentence, and not oneli aftir the wordis, so that the sen- 
tence be as opin, either openere, in English as in Latyn, and go not f er fro the 
lettre ; and if the letter mai not be suid in the translating, let the sentence be 
ever hool and open, for the wordis owen to serue to the entent and sentence, 
and ellis the wordis ben superflu either false." Purvey exemplifies by many 
comparisons between the Latin and English idioms, which show a very good 
knowledge of the principles of English grammar. 

A friend of Lodge, who signs W. K., expresses sound opinions on this sub- 
ject, though not in the purest style, in a letter prefixed to the second edition of 
Lodge's Seneca, 1620. "You are his profitable Tutor," says he, "and have 
instructed him to walke and talke in perfect English. If his matter hold not 



Lect. xxyii.] TEUE AIM OF TEANSLATION. 515 

The rule often laid down, " that in translating a foreign work 
into English, we are to adopt the same style and diction which 
the author would have used had he been an Englishman," is mis- 
taken or inapplicable, because, except in matters of naked fact 
or natural science, a foreigner, writing for foreigners, has a totally 
different set of ideas to express, and a totally different mode of 
conceiving similar ideas, from those which an Englishman writ- 
ing on the same subject would have, and therefore he would 
have written a different book. Had Goethe and Richter been 
born and trained in England, the one could never have produced 
a Wilhelm Meister or a Eaust, the other never a Siebenkas or a 
Quintus Fixlein. Had Shakespeare been a Frenchman by birth 
and education, the world had never seen a Hamlet or a Henry 
IY. 

The true result to be aimed at, where we propose any thing 
beyond the communication of bare fact, is to produce upon the 
mind of the English reader, so far as possible, the same impres- 
sion which the original author produced upon the minds of those 
for whom he wrote. The rule I have just condemned does not 
lead to the accomplishment of this aim, but, so far as it is prac- 
ticable at all, its effect is to translate the author, not his work, to 
give an imitation, not a copy of the original ; whereas it is the 
characteristic of a perfect translation, that it, for the time, trans- 



still the Roman characteristic, I should mistake him one of ours, he delivers 
his mind so significantly and fitly." 

" That ye have not parrot-like spoken his owne words, and lost yourselfe 
literally in a Latine Echo, rendering him precisely verbatim, as if tied to his 
tongue ; but retaining his Sence, have expressed his meaning in our proper 
English Elegancies and Phrase, is in a Translatour a discretion," &c, &c. 

In a series of discourses on the English language, discussions of the origin 
and meaning of particular words can hardly be out of place anywhere, and 
therefore I shall be excused for here noticing a confusion of two English 
words of Latin etymology, both of which occur in the foregoing extracts. 
From the verb s e n t i o , in its two acceptations, the Latins made the nouns 
sententia, opinion, meaning, and s e n s u s , first, physical, afterwards, men- 
tal, perception. The Romans themselves, at last, confounded these two words. 
In Old-English, they were distinguished in form as well as meaning, for sen- 
tence in the time of Purvey was the Latin sententia. In Lodge's time, sen- 
tence had become sence, and we now use sense for both purposes, sentence 
having acquired the meaning of period, or proposition, as well as that of a ju- 
dicial decree. 



516 TKTJE AIM OF TRANSLATION. [Lect, xxvn. 

forms the reader into the likeness of those for whom the story, 
the ballad, or the ode, was first said or sung.* 

The very supposition, that a genial writer could have acquired 
his special intellectual manhood in any but his native land, in- 
volves an absurdity, for it divests him of his nationality, which is 
as essentially a part of him as the fleshly organs wherewith he 
takes into his being the world around him, and reproduces it to 
the consciousness or the imagination of his readers. Shakespeare 
is often cited as an instance of genius too universal to bear the 
stamp of a national mint, and doubtless it is true that in him, more 
than in any other name known in literature, the man predomi- 
nated over the citizen ; but if we compare his works with what- 
ever else modern humanity has produced, we shall find, if not 
positive internal evidence of his birthright, at least abundant 
negative proof that in no land save England could that mighty 
imagination have assumed the form and proportions to which it 
grew. 

But though the end to be sought in translation is simple 
enough, the means are neither obvious nor easy of command. 
There is, however, one principle generally not at all regarded, 
but which is nevertheless of great practical value in transferring 
the productions of creative genius from their native to a foreign 
soil, in such a way that they shall yield the same fruit as in their 
original clime. It is this : we should choose for our translation 
the dialect of the period when our language was in a stage of de- 
velopment as nearly as possible corresponding to that of the 
tongue from which we translate. It seems to have been taken 

* It was upon this principle, that Sigurd, the Apostle of Sweden, in a ser- 
mon delivered about the beginning of the eleventh century, by an extrava- 
gant but not unnatural license, substitutes cold for heat in threatening the 
unbeliever with the torments reserved for the wicked in a future state of ex- 
istence. 

En grimmir guSnrSingar * * skulu hrseSiligu guSs or$i bolvaSir vera 
ok litkastaSir i ytri myrkr, J>ar sem fyrir er frost ok tannagnastran. — Form 
Sog. III. 168. 

And bold traitors to God * * shall be accursed by the terrible word of 
God, and cast out into outer darkness, where is frost and gnashing of teeth. 

The imagination of the Northman, whose life was an almost perpetual 
shiver, would be more readily excited by the idea of suffering from cold than 
of exposure to torment by fire, an element which to him was always a benefi- 
cent agent. 



Lect. XXVII.] DIALECT OF TRANSLATION. 517 

for granted that the dialect of the translator's own time is in all 
cases to be adopted, and by those who labor for the largest pub- 
lic perhaps it must be, but if the original be a work of true art, 
belonging to a period of widely different culture, it is as absurd 
to attempt to modernize it in a foreign tongue as in its own. 
English historical literature furnishes a good illustration. The 
chronicles of Froissart were completed in the year 1400, memo- 
rable for the supposed death of Chaucer, a period when the French 
prose dialect was in a much more advanced stage of development 
than the English. The chronicle was translated by Lord Berners, 
as great a master of English as any writer of his time, in the first 
quarter of the sixteenth century, and again, by Johnes in the 
early part of the present century. Johnes's translation is exe- 
cuted with commendable fidelity, in a good modern English style, 
and is valuable as a repository of facts and dates, but its relation 
to Froissart is that of a lithograph to a Titian, while Lord Ber- 
ners, employing the diction of a period when English prose had 
advanced to a culture corresponding to that of the French of the 
preceding century, and, as he himself says, " not followynge his 
author worde by worde, but ensewing the true reporte of 
the sentence of the mater," gives you so perfect a repetition 
of the great chronicler, that you are quite unconscious whether 
you are reading French or English, and can scarcely resist the 
belief that you are a contemporary of the fair dames and cava- 
liers of high emprize, whose adventures are portrayed with such 
wonderful felicity. 

The rule I have here laid down, though very general in its 
application, has, like most of the principles of literary composi- 
tion, its exceptions. In the wide differences of culture, of 
opinion, and of sentiment, which exist between different nations, 
it may happen that a diction appropriate to the subject as viewed 
by those for whom a particular work of imaginative art is writ- 
ten, may be quite unsuited to the tastes and intellectual habits of 
a contemporaneous people, equally, though differently, cultivated. 
In such cases, a master of the art of translation will select the 
dialect best adapted to express to his public the conceptions of 
the author, though it may be that of another century much in- 
ferior in grammatical refinement. The fine ballad of Lenore by 
Burger, already quoted as an example of imitative felicity of 



518 BALLAD OF LENOKE. [Lect. xxvn. 

sound, affords a good illustration. Tales of this sort are no longer 
current in England, and of course tlie modern dialect of that 
country has not been employed to embody them. They belong 
to earlier English literature, and they are far more effective, re- 
cited in the language employed when they were a part of a liv- 
ing mythology, than when clothed in the critical, sceptical dress 
of a modern magazine. Taylor, therefore, judged wisely in 
translating the ballad into the simpler dialect in which it would 
have been told and understood, when the superstitions of the 
middle ages, if they did not form articles of religious belief, 
were still constantly exciting the imaginations of the English 
people. I even doubt whether he has taken too great a license in 
carrying back the date of the story from the days of the Battle 
of Prague, an event unknown in English traditionary lore, to the 
more familiar age of the Lion-hearted Richard's crusade against 
the Paynim in the Holy Land. Compare these two stanzas of 
Taylor, in the English ballad verse, with a more literal versiou 
in the metre of the original : 

He went abroade with Richard's host 
The Paynim foes to quell ; 
But he no word to her had writt, 
An he were sick or well. 

* * * * 

She bet her breast and wrange her hands 
And rollde her tearlesse eye, 
From rise of morne till the pale stars 
Againe did fleck the sky. 

He'd gone with Fred'ric's host to wield 
The sword on Prague's dread battle-field ; 
Nor had he sent to tell 
If he were sick or well. 

# # # # 

She wrung her hands and beat her breast, 
Until the sun sank down to rest, 
'Till o'er the vaulted sphere 
The golden stars appear. 

The train of reasoning we have been pursuing suggests some 
observations, which I venture to propound at the risk of incurring 
the pains and. penalties justly attached to the philological sin of 
neologism. I refer to a difference which, if it does not really 



Lect. xxyh.] idioms A1S t D idiotisms. 519 

exist, ought, I think, to exist in the English use of the words 
idiom and idiotism. Both words are given in most English dic- 
tionaries, and both exist in the principal European languages, but 
I do not know that they have been anywhere very accurately 
discriminated, while in English they are generally confounded. 
Grammatical writers, for the sake of varying the phrase and 
avoiding repetition, sometimes employ idiom in a loose way as 
a synonym of language or dialect, but this is repugnant both to 
the etymology and the proper signification of the word. Idiom 
is derived from the Greek adjective idiot, own, proper or pecu- 
liar to, and in all its legitimate uses, retains the sense of peculiar- 
ity or speciality. Besides its lax and figurative use as a synonym 
of language or dialect, we employ it in three significations. 

First, to denote the general syntactical character which dis- 
tinguishes the structure of a given language, or family of lan- 
guages. 

Thus, when we speak of the idiom of French, or German, or 
Italian, we mean the assemblage of syntactical rules or forms, by 
which, without reference to the vocabulary, we recognize these 
languages respectively. If I were to translate, word for word, a 
page of French or German into English, any person acquainted 
with those languages would know, at once, by the structure of 
the periods, from which of them I had taken it. The general 
characteristics by which he would detect the original, constitute 
what is called the idiom of the language, in the sense I am now 
considering. For example, in most languages there are different 
forms of the verb for the singular and plural numbers. Thus, 
in English, we say, he is, but they are ; is being used when the 
subject is in the third person singular, are when it is in the third 
person plural. Now, whatever may have been the origin of the 
distinctive forms of the verb, there exists in the language, as it 
is known to us, no reason why is, or any other form, should be 
appropriated to the singular, are, or any other form, to the plural. 
It is, in the present state of etymology, an ultimate, or rather a 
purely conventional, grammatical fact. A corresponding differ- 
ence runs through almost all languages, and therefore, the rule, 
that the verb must agree with its nominative in number, is not an 
idiom or peculiarity of any of them. 

A similar general rule existed in Greek, and in that language 



520 IDIOMS AND IDIOTISMS. [Lect. xxvii. 

there was no assignable reason why the Greek effri 9 like the Eng- 
lish corresponding verb is, should be restricted to the singular, 
and £ usi, like its English equivalent are, should be appropriated 
to the plural. It was altogether an arbitrary rule, but still a rule 
common to the Greek and most other European languages, and 
so, not a Greek idiom. But to this universal rule Greek syntax 
made exceptions, the most familiar of which was, that if the 
plural nominative was of the neuter gender, then the verb was 
in the singular, and did not agree with its nominative. Thus 
they said 61 dvS peart 01 aya$oi iwiv, the men are good, but ra 
fiifiXia ayaSa iffriv^ the books is good. This was a general 
rule of the language, extending to all verbs, and all neuter nom- 
inatives, but it was not a law of universal grammar. It was a 
construction which characterized and individualized the Greek 
language, and, therefore, it was a peculiarity or idiom of that 
language. 

We use idiom, secondly, to denote an individual expression, a 
form of speech applicable to a single phrase, which is contrary to 
the general syntax of the language, but yet sufficiently intelligible 
upon its face even to a foreigner. 

Thus if the substantive verb precede its nominative, so that to 
the hearer the number of the subject is undetermined when the 
verb is pronounced, the verb in Greek may be, in French gener- 
ally must be, in the singular, though the nominative be a mascu- 
line or feminine plural. Accordingly, though we say in English, 
there are men and women, the French say, with the singular 
verb, il est (or il y a) des homines et des femmes; 
there is men and women. This is a departure from the general 
usage of the Greek and French languages, properly applicable 
not to a whole class of words, as neuters at large, but only to the 
substantive verb, and those which represent it.* This peculiarity 
also is popularly called an idiom, but it presents little difficulty, 
because in expressions of this sort, notwithstanding the apparent 
want of concord between the verb and its subject, the meaning 

* Both English and many other languages show a strong tendency to adopt 
this form of expression. The phrase there is with a plural nominative is some- 
times used by speakers who seldom violate the rules of concord in other cases ; 
and many examples of this construction can be found in the works of Lord 
Bacon, Fuller, and other classical English writers. 



Lect. xxvn.] IDIOMS AND IDIOTISMS. 521 

of the individual words would never fail to suggest the sense of 
the proposition. 

The poverty of language, the impossibility of inventing new 
words as fast as new ideas are brought into distinct consciousness, 
has obliged us to give to the word idiom a third sense. 

This is when we employ it to denote that class of linguistic 
anomalies, which teachers of languages and dictionaries call 
phrases or phraseological expressions. These are verbal com- 
binations which contravene all rules, general and special, and the 
purport of which is wholly conventional, and cannot be gathered 
from the meaning of the several members that compose them. 
Examples of this are the French phrases, Jesuis a meme de 
faire telle ou telle chose, I am in a position to do so 
and so, I am able to do so and so; Je viens d'arriver, I 
have just arrived ; and the thousand other arbitrary constructions 
in which the French language abounds. 

To these latter two linguistic forms the name of idiotism has 
been sometimes, though so far as I know, not consistently applied, 
in both French and German, and we shall gain much in clearness 
of expression if we adopt the distinction. 

To recapitulate : Let us say that idiom may be employed 
loosely and figuratively as a synonymn of language or dialect, 
but that, in its proper sense, it signifies the totality of the general 
rules of construction which characterize the syntax of a particular 
language and distinguish it from that of other tongues. Idiot- 
ism, on the other hand, should be taken to denote the systematic 
exemption of particular words, or combinations of particular 
words, from the general syntactical rules of the language to 
which they belong ; or in a more limited sense, we may apply 
the same term to phrases not constructed according to native ety- 
mology and syntax, and whose meaning is purely arbitrary and 
conventional, and then they would properly be styled special 
idiotisms. In a general way, the idiom of a language consists in 
those regular and uniform laws of grammatical construction 
which characterize its syntax ; its idiotisms are abnormal and 
individual departures not only from universal grammar, but from 
its own idiom. 

I have illustrated these distinctions by foreign examples, be- 
cause the simplicity of English syntax renders its peculiarities 



522 IDIOMS AND IDIOTISMS. [Lect. xxvn, 

less palpable, and, in general, its rules are little else than nega- 
tive precepts, but there is room for the same discriminations in 
our own philology. For example, in English, German, Swedish, 
and Danish, the adjective regularly precedes, while in Italian 
and Spanish, it generally follows, the noun. It is the idiom of 
the language which determines the position. We say accord- 
ingly that the English idiom requires the adjective to precede the 
substantive, and this is a rule which governs the construction in 
nearly all cases where that part of speech occurs, a rule distin- 
guishing our syntax from that of the Spanish and Italian. So 
we have our idiotisms. For instance, the phrase, less common in 
American than in English books, the project took air, that is, 
was divulged. So, the use of help for refrain, as, I cannot help 
doing it, for I cannot refrain from doing it ; it turns out that so 
and so, for, it is now ascertained that, &c. 

There are sometimes curious, if not inexplicable, coincidences 
between the conventional idiotisms of different languages. Thus, 
both in English and German we use to make over, in the sense of 
to transfer or convey the right of property ; as, A. made over to 
B. his house in Broadway. Here the proper signification of the 
verb furnishes no clew to the meaning of the phrase in either 
language. In general, however, phrases of this conventional sort 
are peculiar to a single language, and without literal equivalents 
in others.* 

The difficulty of translation does not lie in mere idiomatic 
differences, for the expression ' a beautiful woman ' is the precise 



* There is a class of idiotisms, apparently derived from popular proverbs 
or from current fables, the meaning of which is not to be gathered from the 
proper significations of the words that compose them, and which seems to be 
conventional. Philological research has detected the origin of many of these, 
but in other instances the reason of their force is quite unknown. Two such 
idiotisms occur in a single triplet in Hudibras : 

"When folk fell out, they knew not why, 
When hard words, jealousies or fears 
Set men together oy the ears. 

It will be observed that conventional phrases in French, are for the most 
part (though not without exception) more grammatical and less inexact than 
those employed in English and German. In Italian such phrases are gener- 
ally vague and rhetorical. 



Lect. xxvn.] SOME WOEDS UNTRANSLATABLE. 523 

equivalent of f e m i n a f o r m o s a, though the relative positions 
of the noun and the adjective are reversed, nor can the subtlest 
intellect discern any difference between the English, ' there are 
birds without wings,' and the French, il est, or, il y a, des 
oiseauxsansailes. In these instances, notwithstanding the 
difference of position in one case, and of number and case (des 
o i s e a u x being strictly a genitive) in the other, we may say the 
translation is literal ; and even in those special idiotisms whose 
meaning is conventional, we may generally find logical equiva- 
lents in all languages of the same degree of culture, though the 
form of phrase may be very different. If I translate j e v i e n s 
d'arriver by, I come from to arrive, I utter nonsense, but if I 
say, I have just arrived, I convey the precise import of the 
French phrase, though no one word in the translation, but the 
pronoun, grammatically corresponds to any word in the original. 

But, in spite of the increasing capacity and flexibility of lan- 
guage and the linguistic attainments and dexterity of modern 
translators, every genial idiomatic work will have peculiarities 
and felicities of expression which cannot adequately be rendered 
into any other form. Thought, in every speech, has its ideas 
which admit of but one mode of utterance, and it is impossible 
to translate such expressions either into other terms of the same 
tongue, or into the native words of another. In any two lan- 
guages there are, to use a mathematical phrase, many incom- 
mensurable quantities, many words in each untranslatable into 
the other, nor is it always possible by any periphrase to supply 
an equivalent. Of this untranslatability of single words, simple 
and compound, German offers us many examples. Take the verb 
a h n e n and its derivative noun A h n u n g : We use for them, 
suspect, suspicion, and presentiment, forebode and foreboding, 
anticipate and anticipation, yet in most cases these words fall 
far short of expressing the precise meaning of the original ; and 
in compounds, the familiar and readily intelligible participial 
adjective entseelt has no better correspondent than the un- 
English examinated / and of the numerous words formed with 
the prefix n a c h , as the verbs and verbal nouns, nachwehen, 
nachleben, few can be adequately translated by English com- 
pounds. 

On the other hand, notwithstanding the copiousness of German 



524 FOREIGN WORDS IN GERMAN. [Lect. xxvii. 

in radicals, and its great flexibility and facility in derivation and 
composition, it yet wants legions of words to embody ideas fa- 
miliar to the mind, and well expressed by the tongue, of other 
peoples. Heyse's Dictionary of foreign terms used in German 
contains not less than forty thousand words, and if we deduct 
from these the proper, and purely local names, and those for 
which substitutes have recently been formed from native roots, 
the great number that still remains proves, that even the Teutonic 
speech, rich as it is in words, is yet too poor to live without bor- 
rowing largely from foreign stores, and, of course, that it cannot, 
by simple translation into the domestic vocabulary, appropriate 
to itself and naturalize all the products of alien genius. 

As I have elsewhere remarked, it is said to be a characteristic 
of a perfect style that you can neither add, subtract, exchange, 
nor transpose a single word in a period, without injury to the 
sense. If this be so, how great must be the difficulty -of fairly 
translating a sentence, where not only must every word be 
changed, but where, from the difference in grammar and syntax, 
the number and arrangement of the words must vary in every 
member of the period. But the impracticability of making a 
perfect translation lies less in the want of corresponding phrases 
and idioms in different languages, than in the impossibility of 
transferring to foreign words the associations that cluster around 
the native vocables which they attempt to represent. Of this 
difficulty our English words gentleman, home, comfort, are in-. 
stances. Not that every European country does not possess men 
of truth, courage, honor, generosity, refinement, and elegance of 
conventional manners — the Castilian felt that the Arab had all 
this, when he said that his Moslem enemy was an hidalgo, a 
gentleman, though a Moor ; * — not that Continental Europe 
knows nothing of the pious attractions of the fireside and the 
family circle ; not that convenience, and luxury, and taste, are 
wanting to the dwellings of the wealthy in Germany, in Italy, 
and in France ; but it was in England that the ideal of social 
grace and moral excellence in man, as attributes of humanity 
superior in worth to the artificial claims of rank and conventional 
manner, was first conceived, named, and realized ; it was in Eng- 

* Aunque Moro hijo d'algo. — Old Ballad. 



Lect. xxvn.] PAEAPHEASE AND METAPHEASE. 525 

land that the necessities of a rude climate, and the facilities 
afforded by wealth and a widely-extended commerce, at once 
occasioned and made possible that consummation of moral and 
physical domestic enjoyment, which is implied in the phrase, ' the 
comforts of an English home? This sacred trio, then, the three 
talismanic words, which, next to those still more immediately be- 
longing to the religious, conjugal, parental, and filial ties, are 
the first in the Anglican vocabulary of the heart, are hallowed 
by older memories, gilded by brighter and more venerable asso- 
ciations, than the corresponding terms in other languages ; and 
hence it is that their claims have been so generally recognized as 
to secure their adoption, as words essentially untranslatable, into 
almost every European tongue. 

From these considerations, it is obvious that the art of transla- 
tion is not an ordinary craft, requiring for its skilful exercise no 
other qualification than a familiarity with the dictionary and 
grammar of the tongues between which a version is to be made. 
It demands, further, an intimate, homelike acquaintance with the 
national characters, habits, and associations connected with both 
languages, and especially such a complete command of all the 
resources of the translator's own, as is found only in combination 
with the ability to conceive and produce, as well as to transplant. 
Few good translations have been made except by persons them- 
selves distinguished as able writers ; and at the same time, there 
is no better school of preparatory practice, especially for the use 
of the poetical dialect, than the making of careful translations 
from authors eminent for originality of thought as well as power 
of words. * 

* Some years since, a work of mine on Physical Geography was translated 
into a foreign language for publication, by a person not acquainted with the 
subject treated, and with imperfect knowledge of the language of the original 
and of that to be employed in the translation. The version was a literary 
curiosity. The gross and often ludicrous errors amounted to not less than six 
thousand, or ten to a page. Two things were especially noticeable : one being 
the frequent instances in which the logical character of a period was reversed 
by expressing or inserting a negative particle ; the other was this : I had 
introduced into the text numerous citations translated into English from 
French authors, the French original not being given ; these my translator had 
turned into his own language, not only with general accuracy, but even with 
propriety of expression. Did the French idiom, with which he was better 



526 PAKAPHEASE AND METAPHRASE. [Lect. xxyii. 

The ancient rhetorical instructors advised their pupils to prac- 
tice what was called paraphrase when applied to prose, and meta- 
phrase with reference to poetry. They consist alike in translat- 
ing, if I may thus use the word, the master-pieces of great 
writers into other words in the same language, as our Franklin 
did with Addison. Cicero, speaking in the person of Crassus, 
condemns the practice, on the ground that the original author 
must be taken to have employed the aptest words and syntax to 
express his thoughts, and that the pupil would necessarily acquire 
an inferior style by attempting to clothe them in a different dress. 
Quintilian, however, defends paraphrase and metaphrase as use- 
ful, and will not admit the Latin language to be so poor that the 
same thing may not be excellently said in more than one form of 
expression. Franklin added the converse of paraphrase, which 
I do not know that the ancients practised. He laid aside his 
version until he had forgotten the phraseology of the original, 
and then turned it back again, with as close a conformity to 
Addison's style as he was able to command. Translations from 
foreign languages are free from the objection which Cicero urges 
against paraphrase in the same ; and, in compelling a close ex- 
amination of the precise meaning of the original, and aiding in 
attaining to a command over the vocabulary of our own tongue, 
their advantages are equally great. As a means of acquiring a 
knowledge of foreign languages, translation, combined with re- 
translation, is, I believe, the very best of exercises, except actual 
and extensive daily practice in speaking. It was by this method, 
chiefly, that Queen Elizabeth became so good a classical scholar. 
Roger Ascham, her tutor, says : " After the first declining of a 
nowne and a verbe, she never toke yet Greeke nor Latin gram- 
mar in her hand ; but only by double translating of Demosthenes 
and Isocrates, dailie, without missing, every forenone, and like- 
wise some part of Tullie every afternone, for the space of a yeare 
or two, hath atteyned to soch a perfit understanding in both the 
tonges, and to such a readie utterance of the Latin,* and that 

acquainted than with English, make itself apparent through the disguise of a 
foreign speech, and modify my English style so as to make it more intelligible 
to him ? 

* It must be remembered that the facility here spoken of refers to a dead 
language. Had Queen Elizabeth been called upon to sustain a conversation 



Lect. xxvii. ] PEACTICE OF TRANSLATION. 527 

with such a judgement, as they be f ewe in nomber in both the 
Universities, or els where in Englande, that be in both toriges, 
comparable with her majestic" We may be permitted to doubt 
whether Ascham's account of the progress of his royal pupil is 
not a little overcharged ; but, in any event, it indicates an in- 
dustry and a perseverance not common in personages of so ex- 
alted a rank, in any age or country. 

As a means of acquiring a ready and wide command of our 
native speech, the practice of extemporaneous translation, of 
reading off into English a book 'or a newspaper in a foreign lan- 
guage, is perhaps the very best, except the habit of extemporane- 
ous speaking and constant social intercourse with different classes 



with Cicero, lie would probably have placed a lower estimate upon her know- 
ledge of colloquial Latin than did her learned tutor. There are perhaps few 
subjects upon which one deceives one's self and one's friends more readily 
than as regards real knowledge of a foreign tongue. "I cannot speak it, but 
I understand it," is a common phrase with those who have perhaps sufficient 
acquaintance with a language to make out the subject of a conversation, but 
who would at the same time utterly mistake the drift of it. An old friend of 
mine, who insisted that he perfectly understood whatever was said in Italian, 
having had some altercation with his landlord about his bill, came to me in 
great excitement, saying : " The fellow has attached my horses and says I 
cannot proceed on my journey." On inquiry it turned out that the landlord 
had simply said — ' the gentleman's horses were attacati and that his carriage 
was ready.' A long training of the ear can alone enable a person to appre- 
ciate with nicety the sounds, and to distinguish with rapidity the words, of a 
foreign language. Even when this has been so far accomplished as to allow 
one to speak the new tongue with fluency, there is still much to be learned. 
Italians have a very remarkable aptitude for the acquisition of foreign lan- 
guages, even of those the most disparate from their own. I have known 
many persons of that nation who spoke English with almost absolute perfec- 
tion, and who yet, when listening to the conversation of a fellow-countryman 
in that language, made gross mistakes in judging of his ability to use it. 

I once complimented an English lady on the ease with which she spoke 
German. She smiled and said : "I will tell you a secret ; I could only stum- 
ble pitiably through a German sentence, till one day I resolved to pernlex 
myself no longer with der, die, &c. , or any of their cases, but to stick firmly 
to das. Now I say das for all the articles, pronouns, etc., and nobody seems 
to have found me out." 

I have derived much amusement from the mistakes of foreigners in speak- 
ing English, but it is a source of proud gratification to me that I owe them 
nothing. I have paid them in kind. I am sure that in my own awkward at- 
tempts to speak their languages, I have made as good blunders as any I have 
ever seen or heard from them. 



528 PEACTICE OF TRANSLATION. [Lect. xxvii. 

in life. But translation lias an important advantage over mere 
vernacular practice. Men who speak much, having only their 
own thoughts to express, frame for themselves a comparatively 
narrow vocabulary and syntax, and acquire a wearisome manner- 
ism of style, from which they seldom succeed in emancipating 
themselves. If we listen often to a particular speaker, we rarely 
fail to notice that he has not only his pet words, but a set of ex- 
pletives, stereotyped phrases, and favorite maxims, which he 
mechanically throws in, in the same way, and much for the same 
purpose, as the popular bards hummed a burden at the end of 
every stanza, while summoning their memory or their invention 
to help them out with the next verse. The practice of extem- 
poraneous translation forces us into new trains of thought, de- 
manding new forms of phrase ; lifts us out of the rut, (to use an 
expressive colloquialism,) and confers the power of readily calling 
up familiar or less habitual words and combinations ; thus both 
enlarging our effective vocabulary, and securing us against con- 
tracting a restricted personal dialect which is not only repulsive 
to our hearers, but which reacts injuriously on our own origi- 
nality and variety of thought.* 

* Dr. Johnson complains of translations from foreign literatures, as one of 
the most fertile sources of corruption in language. I doubt whether English 
has suffered much from this cause ; and, on the other hand, the attempts at a 
strict literal rendering of the original text in English, from the time of Here- 
ford to the present day, have enriched both our vocabulary and our syntax 
with many words and combinations which we could ill afford to dispense 
with. Indeed, so far from introducing an extravagant number of foreign 
words and phrases, translation has led to the formation of many happy native 
compounds and derivatives, which would hardly have been struck out except 
in the search for vernacular equivalents of foreign expressions. 



LECTUKE XXYIII. 



The revised version of the Bible, now in general use wherever 
the English tongue is spoken, was executed by order of King 
James L, and was completed and published in the year 1611. A 
comparison of the styles of the Preface and the text with con- 
temporaneous and earlier English literature, shows that the trans- 
lation was taken chiefly from older versions, and that its dialect 
was not that of the current English of its time. 

Its relations to the English language are, for a variety of rea- 
sons, more important than those of any other volume ; and it 
may be said, with no less truth, that no Continental translation 
has occupied an equally influential position in the philology and 
the literature of the language to which it belongs. The English 
Bible has been more universally read, more familiarly known and 
understood, by those who use its speech, than any other version, 
old or new. In the sixteenth century, the English people were 
more generally and more thoroughly protestantized than any 
other nation, and, of course, among them the Bible had a freer 
and more diffused circulation than it had ever attained elsewhere ; 
for though, in individual German States, the reformed religion 
soon became the exclusive faith of the people, yet those States 
formed but a portion of the Germanic nation. Although, there- 
fore, the philological as well as the religious influence of Luther's 
translation was very great, yet it only indirectly and incidentally 
affected the speech of that great multitude of Teutons who 
neither accepted the creed of Luther, nor made use of his 
version. 

* According to Wattenbach, p. 101 et seq., the word Bible is not derived 
from the Greek pifihiov, but from ftifHuorexa, a common designation, in the 
Middle Ages, for collections of different works or treatises bound together in 
one or more volumes. 

23 (529) 



530 FKEE DISCUSSION IN ENGLAND. [Lect. xxvm. 

Again : the discussion of the principles of the Reformation 
and of their collateral results, as a living practical question, con- 
nected not only with men's hopes of a future life, but, through 
civil government, with their dearest interests in this, was longer 
continued in England than in any other European State. The 
Puritan movement kept the debate alive in Great Britain 
long after the wordy war was ended, and men had' resorted to the 
last argument of Kings, in the Continental nations. From the 
year 1611, the Bible in King James's version was generally ap- 
pealed to as the last resort in all fundamental questions both of 
church and state ; for even those Protestant denominations which 
gave the greatest weight to tradition, allowed the paramount 
authority of Scripture, and admitted that traditions irreconcilable 
with the words of that volume were not of binding force. From 
the accession of Elizabeth, therefore, and more especially from 
that of James, until the Acts of Uniformity early in the reign of 
Charles II. for a time extinguished the religious liberties of Eng- 
land, the theological and political questions, which most concern 
man's interests in this world and his happiness in that which is 
to come, were perpetually presented to every thinking English- 
man, as points which he not only might, but must, decide for 
himself at his peril and by lights drawn, directly or indirectly, 
from the one source of instruction to which all appealed as the 
final arbiter. For these reasons, the Bible became known to the 
mind, and incorporated into the heart and the speech, of the 
Anglican people to a greater extent than any other book ever 
entered into the life of man, with the possible exceptions of the 
Hebrew Scriptures, the Homeric poems, and the Arabic Koran. 

Although particular points in the authorized version were 
objected to by the more zealous partisans on both sides of the 
controversy respectively, and though the English Prayer-Book 
continued to employ an older translation in the passages of scrip- 
ture introduced into that ritual, yet the new revision commended 
itself so generally to the sound judgment of all parties, that in a 
generation or two it superseded all others, and has now, for more 
than two centuries, maintained its position as an oracular expres- 
sion of religious truth, and at the same time as the first classic of 
our literature — the highest exemplar of purity and beauty of 
language existing in our speech. 



Lect. xxvm.] MODEEK EELIGIOUS DIALECT. 531 

Those who assent to the views which have been so often ex- 
pressed in these lectures, respecting the reciprocal relations be- 
tween words, individual or combined, and mental action, will 
admit that the influence upon the intellectual character of the 
Anglican people, not of Christian doctrine alone, but of the 
verbal form in which that doctrine has been embodied, can hardly 
be over-estimated. Modern philologists, Europeans even, have not 
been the first to discover the close relation which subsists between 
formulas, the ipsissima verba of the apostle, and the faith he 
proclaims. The believing Jew reads the Pentateuch not only in 
its original tongue, but, as he supposes, in a form approximating 
to the very inflectional and accentual utterance with which its 
revelations fell from the lips of Moses ; and the pious Moslem 
allows no translation, no modernization, of the precepts of the 
Prophet, but contends that the inspired words of the Koran have 
survived, unchanged, the lapse of twelve centuries. There is 
little doubt that the immutability of form in the sacred codes of 
these nations is one of the most important among the causes 
which have given their religions such a rooted, tenacious hold 
upon the minds and hearts of those who profess them ; and the 
same remark applies with almost equal force to the modern 
Greeks, who, in their religious services, employ the original text, 
and to the Armenians, who use a very ancient translation of the 
New Testament. In like manner, the strict adherence of the 
Pomish church to the Yulgate, and to ancient forms of speech, 
in all the religious uses of language, is one of the great elements 
of strength on which the Papacy relies. 

The Hebrew and the Arab, the Brahmin and the Buddhist, 
the Oriental and the Latin Christian, inherit, with the blood of 
their ancestors, if not precisely the popular speech, at least the 
sacred dialect of their legislators and their prophets ; but the 
Greek and Latin languages were too remote from the speech of 
the Gothic nations, to have ever served as a vehicle for imparting 
popular instruction of any sort among those tribes. Hence, the 
earliest missionaries to the Germanic and Scandinavian nations 
learned to address them in the vernacular tongue : portions, more 
or less complete, of the Scriptures and of other religious books, 
were very early translated into the Northern dialects ; and every 
man who adopted Christianity, and the culture which everywhere 



532 ENGLISH BIBLE AND LITEKATTJRE. [Lect. xxviii. 

accompanied it, imbibed its precepts through the accents of his 
own particular maternal speech. Accordingly, though English 
Protestantism has long had its one unchanged standard of faith, 
common to all who use the English speech, yet Protestant 
Christianity, from the number and diversity of the languages it 
embraces, has no such point of union, no common formulas ; and 
this is one of the reasons why the English people, with all their 
nominal divisions and multitudinous visible organizations, have 
not split up into such a wide variety and so extreme a range of 
actual opinion, as have the Protestants of the Continent. What- 
ever theories, therefore, may be entertained respecting the evils 
of a rigorous national conformity to particular symbols — what- 
ever views may be held with regard to the growth, progress, and 
fluctuations of language — both the theologian and the philologist 
will admit, that a certain degree of permanence in the standards 
of religious faith and of grammatical propriety is desirable. The 
authorized version of the Bible satisfies this reasonable conserva- 
tism on both points ; and it is, therefore, a matter of much liter- 
ary as well as religious interest, that it should remain intact, so 
long as it continues able to discharge the functions which have 
been appointed to it as a spiritual and a philological instructor. 

I do not propose any inquiry into its fidelity simply as a pres- 
entation of the doctrinal precepts of Christianity, both because 
such a discussion would here be inappropriate, and because the 
general accuracy of the version is so well established, that it is 
hardly questioned by those who are most zealous for a revision 
of its dialect. Considered simply as a composition, however, its 
relations to our literature, and to the social and moral interests of 
the Anglican family, are well worthy of examination. In the 
first place, then, the dialect of this translation was not, at the 
time of the revision, or indeed at any other period, the actual 
current book-language, nor was it the colloquial speech of the 
English people. This is a point of much importance, because 
the contrary opinion has been almost universally taken for 
granted ; and hence very mistaken views have been, and still are, 
entertained respecting the true relations of the diction of that 
version to the national tongue. It was an assemblage of the best 
forms of expression applicable to the communication of religious 
truth that then existed, or had existed in any and all the succes- 



Lect. xxyiii.J LICHEE'S TEANSLATION. 533 

sive stages through which English had passed in its entire history. 
Fuller, indeed, informs us that when a boy, he was told by a day- 
laborer of Northamptonshire, that the version in question agreed 
nearly with the dialect of his county ; but, though it may have 
more closely resembled the language of that shire, and though it 
certainly most nearly approximated to the popular speech in 
those parts of the realm where English was best spoken, yet, 
when it appeared, it was by no means regarded as an embodi- 
ment of the every-day language of the time. On the contrary, 
its archaisms, its rejection of the Latinisms of the Rhernish Ro- 
manist version, and its elevation above the vulgarisms of the 
market and the kitchen, were assailed by the same objections 
which are urged against it at the present moment. 

The position of the revisers and of their public was entirely 
different from that of Luther and the German people, when the 
great Reformer undertook the task of giving his countrymen the 
Bible in their own tongue ; and, accordingly, very different prin- 
ciples were properly adopted by the German and the English 
translators. German bibles indeed existed before Luther, but 
they were too strongly marked with dialectic peculiarities — too 
incorrect and too much tinctured with Romish opinion — to serve 
even as the foundation of a revision ; and they had not been 
widely enough circulated to have diffused among the people any 
familiar acquaintance with the contents of the sacred volume. 
The aim of Luther was to give to the high and the low of the 
Teutonic race access to the authority on which he based his doc- 
trines, in a form for the first time generally intelligible, and 
scrupulously faithful to the original text. He had before him no 
repository of a sacred, and yet universally understood, phrase- 
ology ; and, as a teacher of the people, he could only make him- 
self comprehended by using the dialect which was the familiar 
every-day speech of the largest portion of the people of his 
native land. Hence, as he says himself, he composed the phrase- 
ology he adopted, out of the living vocabulary which he heard 
employed around him in the street, the market, the field, and the 
workshop, and formed a diction out of elements common to the 
speech of the whole Germanic race. The translation of Luther 
was, no doubt, most readily intelligible in the provinces where he 
had acquired his own vernacular ; but it was so thoroughly idi- 



534 LUTHEK'S TBANSLATION. [Lect. xxviii. 

omatic, so penetrated with the fundamental spirit of the Teutonic 
speech, that it soon obtained a wide circulation, and was easily 
understood in provinces whose popular dialect appeared to be 
very discrepant from that of Luther. Low-German retransla- 
tions of this version, indeed, were published, but they did not 
long continue in use; and for nearly three centuries Luther's 
text has been the only one employed in religious teaching w 
Protestant Germany, however widely the local speech may differ 
from it.* To secure its first introduction to masses ignorant of 
the Bible and without a consecrated dialect, it was necessary that 
it should be clothed in words most readily intelligible to those 
whom Luther desired to reach ; but, that extreme familiarity of 
diction is not a permanent necessity in religious instruction, is 
shown by the fact that that version, and with it the High-German 
dialect, have become almost the sole vehicle for the dissemination 
of Protestant Christianity wherever any branch of the Teutonic 
tongue is spoken. 

Not only is the High-German translation universally read, but 
with few exceptions, pulpit and catechetical instruction is con- 
veyed in High-German throughout the Platt-Deutsch or Low- 
German provinces ; and we learn from Kohl, that even in the 
Frisic districts, where classical German is almost a foreign tongue, 
the peasantry both comprehend the High-German of their pastors, 
and habitually employ its vocabulary themselves in relation to all 
religious topics, though not able to converse in it fluently on 
other subjects. 

The translators, or rather the revisers, of the English Bible of 
1611 and the British people stood, as I have said, in a totally 
different relation to each other. These translators were not the 
teachers of a new doctrine ; the public they addressed were not 
neophytes, nor strangers to the contents or the phraseology of the 
volume now again to be spread before them. England had been 
Protestant, already, for almost three-fourths of a century ; and 
there were comparatively few of the English people who had 
not been taught the precepts of that faith, and made familiar 
with its oracles in their very cradle, through the translations of 

* The latest Platt-Deutsch version was, I believe, that of Bugenhagen, from 
Luther's Hoch-Deutsch translation, and was published, with annotations, at 
Magdeburg, 1545. 1 vol. folio. 



Lect. xxyiii.] TYNDALE'S TRANSLATION. 535 

Tyndale, Coverdale, and others, which were made the basis, and 
furnished the staple, of the new recension. Hence the doctrines 
and the diction of the !S"ew Testament, which they found nearly 
unchanged in that recension, had become almost a part of their 
very consciousness ; and there was no occasion to exchange, for a 
more common or a more artificial speech, the forms of words in 
which they had already learned whatever of most sacred Prot- 
estantism and the Protestant Bible had to teach. Wycliffe and 
his school in the fourteenth, Tyndale early in the sixteenth, 
Coverdale, Cranmer, the Genevan, and other translators at a later 
period in the same century, had gradually built up a consecrated 
diction, which, though not, as it certainly was not, composed of a 
vulgar vocabulary, was, nevertheless, in that religious age, as per- 
fectly intelligible to every English Protestant as the words of the 
nursery and the fireside.* 

In fact, with here and there an exception, the difference be- 
tween Tyndale's ISTew Testament and that of 1611, is scarcely 
greater than is found between any two manuscript copies of most 
modern works which have undergone frequent transcription; 
and Tyndale's, Coverdale's, Cranmer' s, the Bishops', the Genevan, 
and the standard version, coincide so nearly with each other, 
both in sense and in phraseology, that we may hear whole chap- 
ters of any of them read without noticing that they deviate from 
the text to which we have always been accustomed. When, then, 
we study our Testaments, we are in most cases perusing the 
identical words penned by the martyr Tyndale nearly three hun- 
dred and fifty years ago ; and hitherto the language of English 
Protestant faith and doctrine may fairly be said to have under- 
gone no change. 

I remarked that the dialect of the authorized version was not 
the popular English of the time, but simply a revision of older 
translations. It is almost equally true, that the diction of Wycliffe 
and of Tyndale was not that of the secular literature of their 
times. The language of Wycliffe's Testament differs nearly as 
much from even the religious prose writings of his contemporary 



* The difference in style between the translations of the Apocryphal and the 
Canonical Books has been much discussed, but never, so far as I know, satis- 
factorily explained. 



536 WYCLIFFE'S TRANSLATION. [Lect. xxvm. 

and follower, Chaucer, as does that of our own Bible from the 
best models of literary composition in the present day ; and it is 
a still more remarkable and important fact, that the style, which 
"Wycliffe himself employs in his controversial and other original 
works, is a very different one from that in which he clothed his 
translation. This circumstance seems to give some countenance 
to the declaration of Sir Thomas More, otherwise improbable, 
that there existed English Bibles long before "Wyclifle ; and 
hence we might suppose that his labors and those of his school 
were confined to the revision of still earlier versions. But al- 
though English paraphrases, mostly metrical, of different parts of 
the Bible were executed at the very commencement of our litera-" 
ture, yet there is no sufficient ground to believe that there were 
any prose translations of such extent and fidelity as to serve for 
a basis of revision ; and the oldest known complete translation 
of the Old Testament, the earlier text in the late Oxford edition 
of the Wycliife versions, has very much the aspect of a first 
essay. 

This, down to the twentieth verse of the third chapter of 
Baruch, is believed to have been the work of Nicolas de Hereford, 
a coadjutor of Wycliffe — the remainder of the Old Testament, 
and the whole of the New having been, as there is good 3ause to 
believe, translated by Wycliffe himself.* Purvey's recension, 
executed very soon after, is a great improvement upon Hereford, 
who closely followed the Latinisms of the Yulgate ; but Purvey 
founded his diction upon that of Wycliife, and the philological 
difference between the two is by no means important. 

The difference between the version of Wyclifle and that of 
Tyndale was occasioned partly by the change of the language in 
the course of two centuries, and partly by the difference of the 
texts from which they translated ; and from these two causes, the 



* The preface to the Oxford edition of the Wycliffite versions very satisfac- 
torily disposes of most of the questions connected with the authorship of the 
different translations which appeared in the fourteenth century, though the 
internal evidence in support of the opinion, which ascribes to Wycliffe the 
completion of Hereford's translation of the Old Testament does not seem to 
me very conclusive. Much information on the translations of the sixteenth 
century will be found in the Historical Account prefixed to Bagster's Hexapla, 
London, 1841, and the authorities there referred to. 



Lbct. xxvm.] WYCLIFFE AND TYNDALE. 537 

discrepancies between the two versions are much greater than 
those between Tyndale's, which was completed in 1526, and the 
standard version which appeared only eighty-five years later. 
Nevertheless, the influence of Wycliffe upon Tyndale is too pal- 
pable to be mistaken, and it cannot be disguised by the grammat- 
ical differences, which are the most important points of discrep- 
ancy between them. If we reduce the orthography of both to 
the same standard, conform the inflections of the fourteenth to 
those of the sixteenth century, and make the other changes which 
would suggest themselves to an Englishman translating from the 
Greek instead of from the Yulgate,* we shall find a much greater 
resemblance between the two versions than a similar process would 
produce between secular authors of the periods to which they re- 
spectively belong. Tyndale is merely a full-grown Wycliffe, and 
his recension of the ~New Testament is just what his great prede- 
cessor would have made it, had he awaked again to see the 
dawn of that glorious day of which his own life and labors kindled 
the morning twilight. Not only does Tyndale retain the general 
grammatical structure of the older version, but most of its felicit- 
ous verbal combinations ; and, what is more remarkable, he pre- 
serves even the rhythmic flow of its periods, which is again 
repeated in the recension of 1611. "Wycliffe, then, must be 
considered as having originated the diction and phraseology, 
which, for SlVQ centuries, have constituted the consecrated dialect 
of the English speech ; and Tyndale, as having given to it that 
finish and perfection which have so admirably adapted it to the 
expression of religious doctrine and sentiment, and to the narra- 
tion of the remarkable series of historical facts which are recorded 
in the Christian Scriptures. f If we compare Tyndale's JSTew 

* The dialect of the Vulgate had more influence on the style of the transla- 
tion here discussed than I have credited it with in the text. 

f The first of the Rules prescribed to the revisers by King James was this : 
" The ordinary Bible read in the Church, commonly called the Bishops' Bible, 
to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit." The four- 
teenth Rule was : ' ' These Translations to be used, when they agree better with 
the text than the Bishops' Bible, viz., Tyndale's, Matthew's, Coverdale's, 
Whitchurch, Geneva." Fuller, Church Hist., book x., sec. iii. § 1. 

But the Bishops' Bible, and, indeed, ail the others named, were founded 
upon Tyndale ; and, especially in point of general diction, depart very little 
from his rendering. 
23* 



538 ENGLISH SACRED DIALECT. [Lect. xxviii. 

Testament with the works of his contemporaries, Lord Berners 
and Sir Thomas More, or the authorized version with the prose 
of Shakespeare, and Raleigh, and Bacon, and other writers of the 
same date, we shall find very nearly, if not quite, as great a dif- 
ference in all the essentials of their diction, as between the author- 
ized version and the best written narratives or theological discus- 
sions of the present day. But notwithstanding this diversity, the 
language of the authorized translation, as a religious dialect, is and 
always has been very familiar to the English people ; and I do not 
hesitate to avow my conviction that if any body of scholars, of 
competent Greek and Hebrew learning, were now to undertake, 
not a revision of the existing version, but a new translation 
founded on the principle of employing the current phraseology 
of the day, it would be found much less intelligible to the mass 
of English-speaking people than the standard version at this mo- 
ment is. If the Bible is less understood than it was at earlier 
periods, which I by no means believe, it is because it is less studied ; 
and the true remedy is, not to lower its tone to a debased standard 
of intelligence, but to educate the understandings of the Anglican 
people up to the comprehension of the purest and most idiomatic 
forms of expression which belong to their mother-tongue. 

The general result of a comparison between the diction of the 
English Bible and that of the secular literature of England, is, that 
we have had, from the very dawn of our literature, a sacred and 
a profane dialect, the former eminently native, idiomatic, ver- 
nacular, and permanent, the latter composite, heterogeneous, irreg- 
ular, and fluctuating ; the one pure, natural, and expressive, the 
other mixed, and comparatively distorted and conventional. 

It is unfortunate that an unwise economy, which has been too 
often observed in reprinting the scriptures, should, in the common 
editions, have omitted the Translators' Address to the Reader ; 
though it must be allowed that that address by no means acknow- 
ledges the full extent of the obligations which the revisers were 
under to earlier laborers in the same field. The reason of this 
silence was that the older translations were in every man's hands, 
and the fact that the new edition was but an adaptation of them 
was too notorious to need to be stated in detail ; it is nevertheless 
singular that not one of the former English versions should have 
been referred to by name. The revisers content themselves with 



Lect. xxvm.] ENGLISH SACKED DIALECT. 539 

this general statement : " We never thought from the beginning, 
that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make 
of a bad one a good one, but to make a good one better, or out of 
many good ones one principal good one, not justly to be excepted 
against ; that hath beene our endeavor, that our marke." And 
most successful were they in attaining to that mark, in embody- 
ing in their revision the result of the labors of many generations, 
and of hundreds of scholars, and in making it a summing up of 
the linguistic equations solved in three centuries of Biblical ex- 
position, an anthology of all the beauties developed in the lan- 
guage during its whole historical existence. 

Such is the general history and character of the received ver- 
sion. But what are its relations, past and present, to the lan- 
guage of which it is the purest and most beautiful example % I 
have said its diction was not the colloquial or literary dialect of 
any period of the English language. It is even now scarcely 
further removed from the current phraseology of life and of 
books than it was two hundred years since. The subsequent 
movement of the English speech has not been in a right line of 
recession from the scriptural dialect. It has been rather a curve 
of revolution around it. Were it not carrying the metaphor too 
far, I would say it is an elliptical curve, and that the speech of 
England has now been brought by it much nearer to that great 
solar centre, that focus of genial warmth and cheerful light, than 
it was a century ago, when hundreds of words in its vocabulary, 
now as familiar as the alphabet, were complained of as strange or 
obsolete.* In fact the English Bible sustains, and always has 



* In Lecture xii. , p. 228, I remarked that scarcely two hundred words oc- 
curring in the English Bible were obsolete. 

In examining the vocabulary for the purpose of making that estimate, I 
used a Concordance which did not extend to the Apocrypha, and the remark 
should have been limited accordingly. Booker's Scripture and Prayer-book 
Glossary, which I was not able to consult before p. 228 was printed, contains, 
besides phraseological combinations, about three hundred and eighty-eight 
words and senses of words, alleged to be obsolete. Of these, more than one 
hundred belong to the Apocrypha and the Prayer-book, and among the re- 
mainder, there are not less than thirty, such as, loth, whit, stuff, fret, beeves, 
haft, icith, maul, (as a noun,) summer, (as a verb,) &c, which in the United 
States are as familiarly understood, in their scriptural senses, as any words in 
the language. We may therefore take the number of Bible words and special 



540 PEKMANENCE OF SCKIPTUKE. [Lect. xxvni. 

sustained to the general Anglican tongue, the position of a treat- 
ise upon a special knowledge requiring, like any branch of 
science, a special nomenclature and phraseology. The language 
of the law, for example, in both vocabulary and structure, differs 
widely from that of unprofessional life ; the language of medi- 
cine, of metaphysics, of astronomy, of chemistry, of mechanical 
art, all these have their appropriate idioms, very diverse from the 
speech which is the common heritage of all. Why, then, should 
theology, the highest of knowledges, alone be required to file her 
tongue to the vulgar utterance, when every other human interest 
has its own appropriate expression which no man thinks of con- 
forming to a standard, that, because it is common, can hardly be 
other than unclean ? 

There is one important distinction between the dialect of the 
scriptures, considered as an exposition of a theology, and that of a 
science or profession. The sciences, all secular knowledges, in 
fact, are mutuable and progressive, and of course, as they change 
and advance, their nomenclature must vary in the same propor- 
tion. The doctrine of the Bible, on the other hand, is a thing 
fixed and unchangeable, and when it has once found a fitting ex- 
pression in the words of a given language, there is in general no 
reason why those words should not continue to be used so long as 
the language of which they form a part continues to exist. There 
are many words in the English Bible which are strictly technical, 
and never were employed as a part of the common dialect, or for 
any other purpose than the particular use to which they are con- 
secrated in that volume ; there are others which belong both to 
the appropriate expression of religious doctrine and to the speech 
of common life, and of these latter, some very few have become 
obsolete so far as their popular, every-day use is concerned ; but 
they still retain in religious phraseology the signification they 
possessed when introduced into the English translation. 



meanings now so far obsolete in this country that other words are habitually 
used instead of them, at about two hundred and fifty. But of these, many 
are of familiar etymology or composition, and therefore, though disused, 
readily intelligible, and others are well understood, because they are used in 
other books still very generally read, so that the number which there is any 
sufficient reason to regard as really forgotten, does not probably exceed my 
estimate. 



Lect. xxviii.] NEW" TESTAMENT GEEEK AND ENGLISH. 541 

Now the same thing is true with reference to all other know- 
ledges which possess special nomenclatures. There are in law, 
medicine, chemistry, the mechanic arts, many words always ex- 
clusively appropriated to the service of those arts ; others, once 
familiar and common, but which no longer form a part of the 
general vocabulary of the language, and which are at present re- 
stricted to scientific and professional use ; and here the phrase- 
ology of the scriptures and that of other special studies stand in 
precisely the same relations to the common language of the peo- 
ple. Each has, and always must have, a special dialect, because 
it is a speciality itself and has numerous ideas not common to 
any other department of human thought and action. And not 
only is this true of the language of science and of art, but of the 
dialect which belongs to all the higher workings of the intellect. 
No man acquainted with both literature and life supposes that 
the speech of the personages of Shakespeare's tragedies, or of the 
actors in Milton's great epic, was the actual colloquial phrase- 
ology of their times ; and it is as absurd to object to the language 
of the scriptures, because it is not the language of the street, as 
to criticise Shakespeare and Milton, because their human and 
superhuman heroes speak in the artificial dialect of poetry, and 
not in the tones of vulgar humanity. 

To attempt a new translation of the Bible, in the hope of find- 
ing within the compass of the English language a clearer, a more 
appropriate, or a more forcible diction than that of the standard 
version, is to betray an ignorance of the capabilities of our native 
speech, with which it would be in vain to reason, and I suppose no 
scholars whose opinions are entitled to respect, seriously propose 
any thing beyond a revision which should limit itself to the cor- 
rection of ascertained errors, the introduction of greater uniform- 
ity of expression, and the substitution of modern words for such 
as have become either obsolete, or so changed in meaning as to 
convey to the unlearned a mistaken impression. 

The most general objection to any present attempt at revision 
has been well stated by Trench, namely : that " we are not as yet 
in any respect prepared for it ; the Greek and the English which 
should enable us to bring this to a successful end, might, it is to 
be feared, be wanting alike." In fact I doubt whether any im 
partial scholar has ever examined any of the modern attempts at 



542 BIBLE DIALECT. [Lect. xxvin. 

revision, without finding more changes for the worse than for 
the better, and there is one particular in which, so far as I have 
looked into them, they all sin alike. I refer to the use of the 
tenses. Revisers have attempted to establish a parity between 
the tenses of the Greek and English verbs which can hardly be 
made out, and so far is this carried in some of them, as, for ex- 
ample, in the Gospel of John, as revised by five English clergy- 
men, by far the most judicious modern recension known to me, 
that an American cannot help suspecting that the tenses are com- 
ing to have in England a force which they have not now in this 
country, and never heretofore have had in English literature. 

In a lecture on the principles of translation, I laid down the 
rule, that a translator ought to adopt a dialect belonging to that 
period in the history of his own language, when its vocabulary 
and its grammar were in the condition most nearly corresponding 
to those of his original.* Now, when the version of Wy cliff e 
appeared, English was in a state of growth and formation, and 
the same observation applies, though with less force, to the period 
of Tyndale. The Greek of the New Testament, on the other 
hand, was in a state of resolution. It had become less artificial 
in structure than the classical dialect, more approximated to mod- 
ern syntactical construction, and the two languages, by develop- 
ment on the one hand and decay on the other, had been brought 
in the sixteenth century to a certain similarity of condition. 
Besides, the New Testament Greek was under the same necessity 
as early English, of borrowing or inventing a considerable num- 
ber of new terms and phrases to express the new ideas which 
Christianity had ingrafted on the Jewish theology, — of creating, 
in fact, a special sacred phraseology ; and hence there is very 
naturally a closer resemblance between the religious dialect of 
English, as framed by the Reformers, and that of the New Tes- 
tament, than between the common literary style of England and 
the Greek of the classic ages. It will generally be found that 
the passages of the received version, whose diction is most purely 
Saxon, are not only most forcible in expression, but also the most 

* In Littre's Histoire de la Langue Frangaise will be found interesting ob- 
servations on this subject, as well as experiments on the use of contempo- 
raneous dialects as mediums of translation. 



Lect. xxyiii.] EAELT ENGLISH APPBOPEIATE. 543 

faithful transcripts of the text, and that a Latinized style is 
seldom employed without loss of beauty of language, and at the 
same time of exactness in correspondence.* Whatever questions 
may be raised respecting the accuracy with which particular pas- 
sages are rendered, there seems to be no difference of opinion 
among scholars really learned in the English tongue, as to the 
exceeding appropriateness of the style of the authorized version ; 
and the attempt to bring down that style to the standard of to- 
day is as great an absurdity, and implies as mistaken views of the 
true character and office of human language, and especially of 
our maternal speech, as would be displayed by translating the 
comedies of Shakespeare into the dialect of the popular farces 
of the season. 

There is another consideration, the force of which can hardly 
be fully apparent except to persons familiar with philological 
pursuits, and especially with the scriptural languages and with 
early English. The subjects of the Testaments, Old and New, 
are taken from very primitive and inartificial life. With the ex- 
ception of the writings of Paul, and in a less degree of Luke, .there 
is little evidence of literary culture or of a wide and varied range 
of thought in their authors. They narrate plain facts, and they 
promulgate doctrines, profound indeed, but addressed less to the 
speculative and discursive, than to the moral and spiritual facul- 
ties, and hence, whatever may have been the capabilities of He- 
brew and of classical Greek for other purposes, the vocabulary of 
the whole Bible is narrow in extent and extremely simple in 
character. Now, in the early part of the sixteenth century, when 
the development of our religious dialect was completed, the Eng- 
lish mind and the English language were generally in a state of 
culture much more analogous to that of the people and the tongues 
of Palestine, than they have been at any subsequent period. Two 
centuries later, the native speech had been greatly subtilized, if 

* The difference between a Latinized and an idiomatic English style is very 
instructively exemplified in the versions of Hereford and Purvey, and, in a 
less degree, in Wycliffe's New Testament as compared with the later text. 
There is a somewhat similar distinction between the Ehemish translation and 
the Protestant versions of the 16th century, the advantage in almost every 
instance being with the more idiomatic style, in point of both clearness of 
expression and accuracy of rendering. 



544 NO PEESENT CAUSE FOE REVISION. [Lect. xxyhi. 

not refined. Grood vernacular words had been supplanted by 
foreign intruders, comprehensive ideas and their vocabulary had 
been split up into artificially discriminated thoughts, and a corre- 
sponding multitude and variety of terms. The language in fact 
had become too copious, and too specific, to have any true corre- 
spondences with so simple and inartificial a diction as that of the 
Christian Scriptures. Had the Bible then, for the first time, ap- 
peared in an English dress, the translators would have been per- 
plexed and confounded with the multitude of terms, each express- 
ing a fragment, few the whole, of the meaning of the original 
words for which they must stand ; and, whereas, three hundred 
years ago, but one good translation was possible, the eighteenth 
century might have produced a dozen, none altogether good, but 
none much worse than another. "We may learn from a paragraph 
in Trench what a different vocabulary the Bible would have dis- 
played, if it had been first executed or thoroughly revised at that 
period. One commentator, he says, thought the phrase " clean 
escaped " a very low expression ; another would reject " straight- 
way, haply, twain, athirst, ivax, (in the sense of grow,) lack, en- 
sample, jeopardy, garner, passion," as obsolete ; while the author 
of a new translation condemns as " clownish, barbarous, base, hard ? 
technical, misapplied or new-coined," such words as beguile, bois- 
terous, lineage, perseverance, potentate, remit, shorn, swerved, 
vigilant, unloose, unction, vocation, and hundreds of others now 
altogether approved and familiar. 

From what I have said, it will of course be understood, that I 
see no sufficient present reasons for a new translation, or even for 
a revision of the authorized version of the Bible ; but there are 
certain considerations, distinct from the question of the merits of 
that version, which ought to be suggested. The moral and intel- 
lectual nature of man has few more difficult practical problems to 
resolve than that of tracing and following the golden mean between 
a passion for novelty and an ultra-conservative attachment to the 
time-honored and the old. Both extremes are inherently perhaps 
equally mischievous, but the love of innovation is the more dan- 
gerous, because the future is more uncertain than the past, and 
because the irreverent and thoughtless wantonness of an hour may 
destroy that which only the slow and painful labor of years or of 
centuries can rebuild. The elements which enter into the forma- 



Lect. xxvin.] DISTURBANCE OF FORMULAS. 545 

tion of public opinion on great questions of church and state are 
so very numerous, and their mutual relations and influences are 
so obscure, that it is difficult to control and impossible to predict 
the course of that opinion. In free states, ecclesiastical and po- 
litical institutions are of themselves in so mutable a condition, 
that any voluntary infusion of disturbing ingredients is generally 
quite superfluous, and under most circumstances not a little haz- 
ardous. Intimately connected with the changes of opinion on 
these great subjects are the changes constantly going on in lan- 
guage, and which so many circumstances in modern society are 
accelerating with such startling rapidity. Fluctuations in lan- 
guage are not merely a consequence, they are yet more truly an 
indication and a cause, of corresponding fluctuations in moral and 
intellectual action. Whoever, therefore, uses an important word 
in a new sense, is contributing to change the popular acceptation, 
and finally the settled meaning, of all formulas in which that 
word is an element. Whoever substitutes for an old word of 
well understood signification a new vocable or phrase, unsettles, 
with the formulas into which it enters, the opinions of those who 
have habitually clothed their convictions in those stereotyped 
forms, and he thus introduces, first, doubt, and then, depaj'ture 
from long received and acknowledged truth.* Experience has 
taught jurists that in the revision or amendment of statutes, and 
in sanctioning and adopting by legislative enactment current prin- 
ciples of unwritten law, it is a matter of the first importance to 
employ a phraseology whose precise import has been fixed by a 
long course of judicial decisions, and it has been found impossible 
in practice to change the language of the law, for the purpose of 
either modernizing or making it otherwise more definite, famil- 
iar, or intelligible, without at the same time changing the law 
itself. Words and ideas are so inseparably connected, they 
become in a sense so connatural, that we cannot change the one 
without modifying the other. Every man who knows his own 
language finds the modernization of an old author, substantially 
a new book. It is not, as is often pretended, a putting of old 
thoughts into a new dress. It is the substitution of a new 

* ""Words are great powers in this world ; not only telling what things are, 
but making them what else they would not be." 

Martlneau's Sermon, The Sphere of Man's Silence. 



546 INEXPEDIENCY OF KEVISION". [Lect. xrvni. 

thought more or less divergent from the original type. Lan- 
guage is not the dress of thought ; it is its living expression, and 
it controls both the physiognomy and the organization of the idea 
it utters. 

A new translation of the Bible, therefore, or an essential modi- 
fication of the existing version, is substantially a new book, a 
new Bible, another revelation ; and the authors of such an enter- 
prise are assuming no less a responsibility than that of disturbing, 
not the formulas only, but the faith of centuries. Nothing but a 
solemn conviction of the absolute necessity of such a measure can 
justify a step involving consequences so serious, and there are 
but two grounds on which the attempt to change what millions 
regard as the very Words of Life, can be defended. These 
grounds, of course, are, first, the incorrectness of the received 
version, and secondly, such a change in the language of ordinary 
life, as removes it so far from the dialect of that version, that it 
is no longer intelligible without an amount of special philological 
study out of the reach of the masses who participate in the uni- 
versal instruction of the age. 

Upon this latter point, I can only recapitulate what I have 
already said, in expressing my decided opinion that the diction of 
the English Bible in general cannot be brought nearer the dialect 
of the present day, without departing from the style of the origi- 
nal in the same proportion as it is made to approximate to more 
modern forms and a more diversified vocabulary. At the same 
time, it is not to be denied, that modern criticism has established 
some better readings of the original text, detected some unim- 
portant misinterpretations of undisputed readings, and pointed 
out some deviations from idiomatic propriety of expression in the 
English of our version. None will dispute that the removal of all 
such blemishes would be highly desirable, but there is little rea- 
son to suppose that such an improvement is practicable at the 
present moment, or that the attempt could now be made without 
the hazard of incurring greater evils than those which, by any 
large body of competent judges, are now believed to exist. That 
there is any special present necessity for a revision cannot be 
seriously pretended, and a strong, perhaps I should say a decisive, 
objection against a present attempt to revise, is the state of exist- 
ing knowledge with respect both to the ancient and the modern Ian- 



Lect. xxnn.] INCREASING KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH. 547 

guages concerned in the translation. There is no sufficient rea- 
son to doubt, that at the end of this century the knowledge of 
biblical Greek and Hebrew will be as much in advance of the 
present standard as that standard is before the sacred philology of 
the beginning of the century ; and there are, on the other hand, 
the strongest grounds for believing that English in its history, its 
true significance, its power, will then be better understood, and 
more ably wielded than at this day it is, or can be. The critical 
study of English has but just commenced. We are at the be- 
ginning of a new era in its history. Great as are its powers, 
men are beginning to feel that its necessities are still greater. 
There is among its authors an evident stretching out for addi- 
tional facilities of expression, and as a means to this end, a deeper 
reaching down into the wells of its latent capabilities, and hence, 
as I have so often remarked, a more general and zealous study of 
those ancient forms of English out of which was built up the 
consecrated dialect of our mother-tongue. A revision of the 
English Bible, then, is at the present time not merely unneces- 
sary, but, with reference to our knowledge of language, wholly 
premature, and whatever is now done in this way will assuredly 
be thrown aside as worthless, whenever changes in the English 
speech, or the discovery of important errors in the received trans- 
lation, shall make the want of a better a real want. 

The present is an unfavorable moment in some other respects. 
The acuteness of German criticism, the speculations of German 
philosophy and theology, have given rise to a great multitude 
and diversity of opinions, not on questions of verbal interpreta- 
tion merely, but of doctrine also, which are but just now begin- 
ning to be openly and freely discussed in this country and in 
England, and the minds of men are now perhaps more unsettled 
on these topics than they have been at any time for three cen- 
turies. It is highly improbable, that, leaving the question of 
competency aside, a sufficient number of biblical scholars could 
be found, even within the limits of any one Protestant denomina- 
tion in either country, whose theological views so far harmonize 
that they would agree in new forms of expression upon points 
now under discussion ; and, of course, between them and scholars 
of other denominations, the discrepancy would be still wider, so 
that every sect, however few in numbers, which feels the want 



548 ' EVILS OF MANY REVISIONS. [Lect. xxvm. 

of a revision, would be under the necessity of framing one for it- 
self. There seems, however, to be some reason for believing, 
that when the excitement growing out of the novelty of the dis- 
cussions which are going on, in lay as well as clerical circles, shall 
have subsided, there will be a more general concurrence of opin- 
ion, both in denominations and between them ; and then there is 
room to hope that increased harmony and increased knowledge 
may conspire to give the English Bible a greater perfection in 
point of accuracy and of expression, and at the same time a catho- 
lic adaptation to both the future speech and the future opinion of 
English and American Protestant Christianity. 

The objections against a multitude of sectarian translations are 
very serious. The dialect of the English Bible is also the dialect 
of devotion and of religious instruction wherever the English lan- 
guage is spoken, and all denominations substantially agree in 
their sacred phraseology, with whatever difference of interpreta- 
tion. There are always possibilities of reconciliation, sympathies 
even, between men who, in matters of high concernment, habitu- 
ally use the same words, and appeal to the same formulas ; 
whereas a difference of language and of symbols creates an almost 
impassable gulf between man and man. When, therefore, we 
have, not different churches only, but different Bibles, different 
religious dialects, different devotional expressions, the jealousies 
of sectarian division will be more hopelessly embittered, and the 
prospect of bringing about a greater harmony of opinion and of 
feeling among English-speaking Protestants proportionally dark- 
ened. 

At this day, there could be no harmony of action on this sub- 
ject between different churches. Even Trench, a man of a liberal 
spirit, seems to reject the plan of uniting for this purpose with 
those not embraced in the organization of his own church, though 
he admits, that, with the exception of the " so-called Baptists," 
they might advantageously be invited to offer suggestions — to be 
decided upon, apparently, by a body of which they are not to be 
members. Those who proclaim views of such narrow exclusiveness 
have no right to expect that theologians who dissent from them 
on questions of ecclesiastical government will be more charitable 
than themselves, and it is not probable that scholars who are not 
of the English church will be very prompt to offer suggestions 



Lect. xxvm.] SECTAKIANISM. 549 

upon such terms. So long as this sectarian feeling — for it can be 
appropriately designated by no other term — prevails on either 
side, there can be no union upon conditions compatible with 
the self-respect of the parties ; and unless better counsels prevail, 
whenever revision comes, English and American Protestantism 
will have not one Bible, one standard of religious faith, but many. 

Besides the inconveniences of such a state of things as that to 
which I have just alluded, there is the further evil, that each one of 
the new revisions will be greatly inferior to what the joint labors 
of scholars of different denominations might produce. Whatever 
crude and hasty opinions * individuals may adopt with respect to 
the superior learning and ability of their own religious commun- 
ions, it is very certain that neither the English church, nor any 
other Christian sect, possesses, within its own limits, so full a 
measure of knowledge and talent, that in such a work as the re- 
vision of the English Bible, it can afford to dispense with the co- 
operation of other denominations; and the ecclesiastical body 
which cuts itself off from other branches of the church, by at- 
tempting that work without at least an earnest effort to secure such 
co-operation upon equal and honorable terms, may justly be 
deemed schismatic. 

In a brief discourse like the present, the arguments on this 
question can be hinted only, not detailed ; but I think we may 
justify the general conclusion, that as there is no present necessity 
for a revision, so is there no possibility of executing a revision in a 
way that would be, or ought to be, satisfactory even to any one 
Protestant sect, still less to the whole body of English-speaking 
Protestants. To revise under present circumstances, is to secta- 
rianize, to divide the one catholic English Bible, the common 
standard of authority in Protestant England and America, into a 
dozen different revelations, each authoritative for its own narrow 
circle, but, to all out of that circle, a counterfeit ; it is a practical 
surrender of that human excellence of form in the English Bible, 

* An old and just definition of opinio, is assensus rei non explor- 
a t se , and there is a vast deal of sectarian religious opinion in all Christian 
denominations, which cannot lay claim to any higher logical value. 

Veritate manifestata, cedat oppinio veritati. Qui est a dire en Francois, 
que quant verite est manif estee, toute oppinion doit cesser et donner lieu a" 
verite. — Oresme, p. 1. 



550 REVISION NOW INEXPEDIENT. [Lect. xxvin. 

which, next to the unspeakable value of its substance, is the 
greatest gift which God has bestowed on the British and Ameri- 
can people. 

Note. — During the twenty and more years that have passed since the above 
lecture was written, a Revision of the Authorized Version of the Bible of 1611 
has been undertaken, and the best scholars in England and America have con- 
tributed, either as actual translators or as advisers, to its completion. The 
Revision of the New Testament has made its appearance within the last few 
months. But a minute criticism of this Revison would involve too much both 
of theological and linguistic discussion to find an appropriate place in a course 
of Readings the object of which is the illustration of English philology, not 
of Protestant religious opinion nor of English classical learning. It may be 
added that the Revision, whatever may be its merits, has not been so generally 
accepted in England or in the United States of America, as to be justly con- 
sidered as having superseded the version of 1611, to which indeed it for the 
most part conforms. It is not therefore, at present, entitled to be treated as 
the authorized representation of Protestant views of Christian doctrine, nor as 
the best example of the English sacred dialect. So far as it conforms to the 
standard translation, its value as an English classic is, of course, very great, 
but where it deviates from the earlier version, though there is no doubt some- 
times a real and important gain in accuracy of interpretation, yet I do not 
think that it is, in general, equally felicitous in expression, and consequently 
does not seem to me to hold so high a rank in this respect. 

I cannot avoid the conclusion, that the result of this experiment at Revision 
will strengthen rather than otherwise, the position taken in this Lecture, viz., 
that an immediate revision is premature. 



LECT UKE XXIX. 

CORRUPTIONS OF LANGUAGE. 

In studying trie history of the successive changes in language, 
it is by no means easy to discriminate, at all times, between posi- 
tive corruptions, which tend to the deterioration of a tongue in 
expressiveness or moral elevation of vocabulary, in distinctness of 
articulation, in logical precision, or in clearness of structure, and 
changes which belong to the character of speech, as a living semi- 
organism connatural with man or constitutive of him, and so par- 
ticipating in his mutations. By these latter changes, language 
continually adapts itself to the intellectual and material condition 
of those who use it, grows with their growth, shares in their revo- 
lutions, perishes in their decay. Its changes of this sort can be 
resisted by no limited special effort, and they can be checked only 
by the same conservative influences that retard the decline of the 
race to which it is vernacular. Mere corruptions, on the con- 
trary, which arise from extraneous or accidental causes, may be 
detected, exposed, and if not healed, at least prevented from 
spreading beyond their source and infecting a whole nation. To 
pillory such offences, to point out their absurdity, to detect and 
expose the moral obliquity which too often lurks beneath them, is 
the sacred duty of every scholar, of every philosophic thinker, 
who knows how nearly purity of speech, like personal cleanliness, 
is allied with purity of thought and rectitude of action. When, 
therefore, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table ridicules the affec- 
tation of responding to a remark of your companion by an inter- 
rogative, Yes f when a journalist laughs at the Cockney use of 
immediately and directly in the place of as soon as, or after ; 
as for example, directly John came, I went away ;** or the Ameri- 

* It is to be regretted that even Buckle and other distinguished English 
writers of our day have sanctioned by their example this very objectionable 
form. 

(551) 



552 VULGAKISMS IN LANGUAGE. [Lect. xxix. 

canism of employing community without the article, as in com- 
munity, for in the community ; the vulgarism of such phrases as, 
in our midst, and, unbeknown to me ; the preciosity, if I may 
use an expressive Gallicism, of not merely pronouncing but of 
exaggerating the t in often, as if it were of then or oftten ; the 
provincial substitution of the obscure for the clear pronunciation 
of the final vowel, transforming Mississippi and Ohio into Miss- 
issippiih and Ohiuh ; in all these cases, a real service is rendered 
to the community, and to the language. 

Latham appears to me to confound the progress of natural lin- 
guistic change, which is inevitable, and the deterioration arising 
from accidental or local causes, which may be resisted, and he de- 
nies that there can be any such thing as the corruption of a lan- 
guage. All languages, he thinks, are equally intelligible, and 
consequently, equally what they ought to be, namely, mediums 
of intercourse between man and man, and hence, continues he, 
" in lemguage whatever is is right." In the concluding para- 
graph of the Preface to the second edition of his Treatise on the 
English Language, he observes : "lam not desirous of sacrificing 
truth to an antithesis ; but so certain is language to change from 
logical accuracy to logical license, and at the same time, so cer- 
tain is language, when so changed, to be as intelligible as before, 
that I venture upon asserting that not only whatever is is right / 
but also that in many cases whatever was was wrong.'''' There is 
in this passage a singular confusion of thought and of expression. 
First it maintains the paradox that when languages have degen- 
erated from logical accuracy to logical license they are right, and 
that when they were spoken with logical accuracy they were 
wrong / and, secondly, the final conclusion contradicts the 
premises from which it is deduced. The argument is, that lan- 
guage always adapts itself to the uses of those who employ it, 
that it changes only as they change, and that it is at all times equally 
well suited to the great purposes for which that faculty was 
given to man. If this is so, then that which was must have been 
right for the time when it was, upon the same principle that that 
which is is right for the present time. To affirm, then, as a re- 
sult from the general doctrine of the constant adaptation of lan- 
guage to man's nature and wants, that all that at any time is in lan- 
guage is right, but that something which at a past time was 



Lect. xxix.] LATHAM ON LANGUAGE. 553 

was wrong, is not an " antithesis," but a palpable inconsistency, a 
contradiction in terms. Either, then, our author means that 
whatever is is right, and, upon the same principle, whatever was 
was right, but, by virtue of necessary changes in speech, much 
that was right is at present wrong, or he means nothing at all ; and 
his entire proposition is at war with itself, and, as lawyers say, re- 
pugnant. But notwithstanding the authority of Latham, I see no 
reason why, independently of the evidence of comparison between 
different stages of a given tongue, we may not as well speak of 
the corruption of a language, as of the deterioration of a race. No 
man doubts that certain species or families of animals, man himself 
included, become, by change of climate, or of other natural con- 
ditions, physically inferior to what they have been in former and 
different circumstances, and there is unhappily equally irresistible 
evidence of the moral and intellectual deterioration of nations. 
When therefore a people, once great in mind, great in virtue, 
powerful in material energy, becomes enfeebled in intellect, de- 
praved in heart, and effeminate in action, and their language 
drops the words belonging especially to the higher faculties and 
perceptions, or perverts them to sensuous, base, earthly uses, 
and is no longer capable of the expression of lofty conceptions, 
generous emotions, or virtuous resolves, are we not to say that 
their language is corrupted ? So far as respects the needs and 
conveniences of material life, it may perhaps be true that one 
form of it is as expressive and appropriate as another, but the 
theory which I am combating, forgets that language is not a tool, 
or even a machine, but is of itself an informing vital agency, and 
that, so truly as language is what man has made it, "just so truly 
man is what language has made him. The depravation of a lan- 
guage is not merely a token or an effect of the corruption of a 
people, but corruption is accelerated, if not caused, by the per- 
version and degradation of its consecrated vocabulary ; for every 
human speech has its hallowed dialect, its nomenclature appro- 
priated to the service of sacred things, the conscience, the gener- 
ous affections, the elevated aspirations, without which humanity 
is not a community of speaking men, fj.epo7tcov avOpoortGov, but 
a herd of roaring brutes. "When, therefore, popular writers in 
vulgar irony apply to vicious and depraved objects, names or epi- 
thets set apart by the common consent of society to designate the 
24 



554 LOCAL COEEUPTIONS. [Lect. xxix. 

qualities or the acts which constitute man's only claim to rever- 
ence and affection, they both corrupt the speech, and administer 
to the nation a poison more subtile and more dangerous, because 
less obvious, than the bitterest venom with which the destructive 
philosophy has ever assailed the moral or the spiritual interests of 
humanity. 

Besides the moral degradation of language, accidental circum- 
stances, such as the affectations and caprices of fashionable society, 
the inaccuracies or the whim of a distinguished and influential 
individual, and especially the ambitious ignorance of would-be 
reformers, often corrupt language philologically, by introducing 
violations of grammar, or of other proprieties of speech, which a 
servile spirit of imitation adopts, and which, at last, supersede 
proper and idiomatic forms of expression. Again, the usage of 
a great city or an important province, itself occasioned purely by 
local and temporary circumstances, may extend over a whole 
country, and thus words, phrases, syntactical combinations, not 
only ill-suited but repugnant to the genius of a language, may 
force their way into it to the exclusion of more appropriate terms, 
and become permanent, though inharmonious and ill-assimilated 
ingredients of the national speech. Changes of this sort are not 
exemplifications of the general laws of language, any more than 
the liability to be smitten with pestilence through infection is an 
exemplification of the normal principles of physiology ; and there- 
fore a language thus affected is as properly said to be corrupted, 
as a person who has taken a contagious malady to be diseased. 

So with respect to pronunciation. Are not the emasculation 
of our once manly and sonorous tongue by contracting long vow- 
els into short ones, and by suppressing short vowels altogether, 
the crowding of half a dozen syllables into one explosive utter- 
ance, the thick, indistinguishable articulation, the crazy confusion 
of the aspirate and the silent A, — all of which characterize the 
native dialect of London, and which but for the influence of 
printing on pronunciation,* would have spread over the whole 
island, — are not these corruptions of speech which should be ex- 
posed, stigmatized, and corrected, as well as moral delinquencies 
or vulgarisms of manner ? To deny that language is susceptible 



* See Lect. xxi., p. 390 et seq. 



Lect. xxix.] IGNOKANCE OF EEFOEMEES. 555 

of corruption, is to deny that races or nations are susceptible of 
depravation ; and to treat all its changes as normal, is to confound 
things as distinct as health and disease. 

I have spoken of the ignorance of grammarians as a frequent 
cause of the corruption of language. An instance of this is the 
clumsy and unidiomatic continuing present of the passive voice, 
which, originating not in the sound common sense of the people, 
but in the brain of some grammatical pretender, has widely spread, 
and threatens to establish itself as another solecism in addition to 
the many which our syntax already presents. The phrase ' the 
house is being built] for c the house is building] is an awkward 
neologism, which neither convenience, intelligibility, nor syntac- 
tical congruity demands, and the use of which ought therefore 
to be discountenanced, as an attempt at the artificial improve- 
ment of the language in a point which needed no amendment. 
The English active present, or rather aorist, participle in -ing is 
not an Anglo-Saxon but a modern form, and did not make its ap- 
pearance as a participle until after the general characteristics 
which distinguish English from Saxon were fixed. The Saxon 
active participle terminated in ende, as lufigende, loving ; 
but there was a verbal noun with the ending -ung, sometimes 
written -ing, as clsensung or clsensing, cleaning or 
cleansing. The final vowel of the participle was soon dropped, 
and the termination -and or -end became the sign of that part of 
speech. The nominal form in -ung also disappeared, and -ing 
became the uniform ending of verbal nouns. Between the verbal 
noun of action and the active participle, there is a close gram- 
matical as well as logical analogy, which is exemplified in* such 
plirases in French and English as l'appetit vient en man- 
ge a n t , appetite comes with eating. Hence the participle end- 
ing in -and or -end and the verbal noun ending in -ing were con- 
founded, and at last the old participial sign, though long contin- 
ued in Scotland, was dropped altogether in England, and the sign 
of the verbal noun employed for both purposes. I have observed 
on former occasions, that when new forms are superseding old 
ones, as for example, in the substitution of its for his as a neuter 
possessive, since for sith, there is often a period when good writ- 
ers avoid the employment of either. This was the case with re- 
gard to the new and old forms of the active participle, for in the 



556 PASSIVE WITH " BEING." [Lect. xxix. 

Orinuluni, which contains more than twenty thousand lines, there 
is not a single instance of the nse of the active participle in either 
form, though there are four or five participial adjectives in -end, 
and twenty or twenty-five verbal nouns in -ing. The ancient 
termination in -end survived in popular speech long after it be- 
came extinct in literature, and the vulgar pronunciation, goin\ 
living and the like, is a relic of that form, not a dropping of the 
nasal g final in the modern inflection. 

The earliest form in which the phrase we are considering oc- 
curs is, ' the house is in building, or a building,' a being probably 
a contraction of the Saxon o n , or the modern English m.* Ben 

* The following examples show that the form " in building,' or, "a build- 
ing," was in constant use from the very dawn of English literature to the 
seventeenth century. In III. (I.) Kings vi. 7, we have, in the older Wyeliffite 
version, was beeldid ; in the later, was in Mldyng ; in a manuscript of the 14th 
century, quoted by Hearne, Langtoft's Chronicle I. cxcvii., whille the churche 
was in byldynge ; in the old romance of Robert the Devyle, Thorn's edition, 
p. 8, as this chylde was a berynge to the chirche, p. 32, whyle your penaunce 
be a doynge ; in the prose Morte D' Arthur, Lib. II. c. viii., the mene whyle 
as this was a doyng ; in Skelton's Tales, Dyce's edition I. lxiv., there shall you 
see my tombe a makynge ; in Lord Berners's Froissart I. 143, had beene longe 
a makynge, p. 255, was longe a dryvinge ; in Palsgrave's French Grammar, 
pp. 380, 382, 383, 384, in doing, and other similar constructions ; in Tyndale's 
and Coverdale's translations, John ii. 20, this temple was abuldynge ; in Cran- 
rner's and the Geneva versions of the same passage, was a byldyngc ; in I. 
Peter iii. 20, in Tyndale's, Coverdale's, Cranmer's, and King James's transla- 
tions, while the ark was a preparing ; in the Rhemish version of the same verse, 
was a building ; but in the Geneva, the modern form, the ark teas preparing ; in 
Holinshed iii. 126, whilst these things were a dooing ; in I. Kings vi. 7, au- 
thorized version, while it was in building ; in Shakespeare, Macbeth iii. 4, 
while jtis a making, Hamlet i. 3, as it is a making ; in John Smith's Virginia, 
230, their shallop, which was a mending; in Howell's Dodona's Grove, 107, 
a doing, and in Hawley's Preface to Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum, in doing, in both 
these last instances, as well as in all the others, in a passive sense. 

Thus, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the verbal noun, with 
the preposition in or a, appears to have been constantly employed. The 
phrase, the ark was preparing, given from the Geneva New Testament, in Bag- 
ster's Hexapla, is probably a misprint for a preparing, as no other example of 
that form is known to occur until long after the date of that version. The 
only early instances of a construction bearing any analogy to the neologism, 
is being built, which I have been able to find, are in Fabyan's Chronicle, 
Ellis's reprint of Pynson's edition of 1516. These are, page 1, " The Cytie of 
Rome was begone to be buylded in the XI. yere of Esechias"; and p. 576, " In 
this yere also was ye Guylde halle of Lodon begon to be newe edyfied"; but 
these have little direct bearing on the question. After the construction in, 



Lect. xxix.] PASSIVE WITH "BEING." 557 

Jonson, in his English grammar, states expressly that before the 
participle present, a, and if before a vowel, an, give the partici- 
ple the force of a gerund ; and he cites as an example, " a great 
tempest was a "brewing" The obvious explanation of this form 
of speech is, that what grammarians choose to call a present par- 
ticiple, is really a verbal noun ; and, if so, there is nothing more 
irregular or anomalous in the phrase ' the ship is in building,' 
than in saying ' be industrious in working, be moderate in drink- 
ing '; for the verbal noun may as well have a passive, as an active 
or a neuter signification. 

The preposition on or a was dropped about the beginning of 
the eighteenth century, but it is still understood ; and in this 
construction, though the form is the same as that of the participle, 
the verbal noun is still as much a noun as it was when the prepo- 
sition was expressed. 

But if this explanation be rejected, and it be insisted that, in 
the phrase in question, building, making, &c, are true parti- 
ciples, active in form, but passive in signification, the construc- 
tion may be clef ended both by long usage, which is the highest of 
all linguistic authorities, and by the analogy of numerous estab- 
lished forms of speech, the propriety of which no man thinks of 
questioning. The active form is passive in sense in the phrases, 
he is to blame, I give you this picture to examine, he has books 



or, a building, making, &c, went out of use, the verbal noun was regularly 
employed with a passive signification, as in this expression in the XXIII. 
Letter of Junius, " the lines are draioing around him," until a very recent 
period. 

Other examples of the use of the participial noun in a passive sense, are : 
"We have a wyndowe in werchynge," Piers Ploughman, Vision, 1451; 
" Ther the man lith an helyng," Ibid., 11599 ; " Whils Veni Creator Spiritus is 
a singing," Rutland Papers, 13; "In great aduenture of takynge with the 
Sarazins," Froissart, I. 657; "In dout of betray 'inge," Ibid., 734; " Whyle 
every thyng was a preparynge," Ibid., II. 746 ; " Whyle these wordes were 
in speaTcynge," Sir T. More, Life of Edw. V., reprint of Hardyng, 507 ; "I 
went to their places where they make their anchors, and saw some making ; 
also I saw great peeces of ordinance making," Coryat's Crudities, reprint, I. 
282 ; " While these preliminary steps were taking," Robertson, Charles V., B. 
XII.; " The illustrations preparing for the third volume," Ruskin, Mod. P., 
vol. II., Advertisement; "The extent of ravage continually committing, 
Ibid., p. 5, note ; but, " it is being swept away," Ibid., same page, text; " the 
palaces are being restored" " the marbles are being scraped," Ibid., p. 7, note. 



558 PASSIVE WITH "BEING." [Lect. xxix. 

to sell, this fruit is good to eat. It is true that in these expres- 
sions, and others of similar construction, what appears to be an 
infinitive active is not so, bnt a relic of the Anglo-Saxon corre- 
sponding phrase, consisting of a gerund preceded by the parti- 
ciple to, which in that language was not the sign of the infinitive, 
as it is in modern English ; but, nevertheless, the analogical 
argument from an authorized use of an active form in a passive 
sense remains unaffected. The common expression, these books 
sell well, and many others similar in principle, admit of no such 
explanation ; and the verb, though active in inflection, is as une- 
quivocally passive in signification, as are the Latin v a p u 1 o and 
v e n e o. Upon what principle, except the passive use of an active 
participial form, can we explain such phrases as drinking-water, 
a riding-horse, for water fit to be drunk, or a horse kept to be 
ridden ? It is no answer to say that these are to be considered as 
compound words, because the passive sense still remains with the 
active ending. So, in this expression, ' considering the shortness 
and uncertainty of life, it is presumptuous in any man to expect 
to attain to the age of a hundred years,' considering is used in a 
passive sense, as is seen clearly by the French equivalent in this 
construction, which is the passive participle v u or a 1 1 e n d u. * 
The expressions, the falling-sickness, a stepping-stone, a spin- 
ning-wheel, a stumbling-oloch, a drinking-glass, a working-day, 
the latter two of which at least are true compounds, are not ex- 
actly analogous with any I have cited ; for though drinking- 
water is water that is or may be drunk, and a riding-horse is a 
horse that is or may be ridden, yet we cannot so convert these 
last phrases. A drinking-glass is not a glass to be drunk ; but 
neither is it the glass that drinks, the day that works, or the 
wheel that spins. But, though not grammatically identical, these 
constructions are of the same anomalous character as ' the house 
is building ' — the resolution of which into ' the house is a build- 
ing, or in building,' is as easy and as idiomatic as to translate 
1 drinking-glass ' into ' a glass for drinking.' 

* When the sentence contains a personal nominative with which the parti- 
ciple may agree, it may possibly be regarded as active ; as, for example, ' con- 
sidering the feeble state of his health, he ought not to undertake the journey'; 
which may be resolved into, ' he, considering the feeble state of his health, 
ought not,' &c. 



Lect. xxix.] PASSIVE WITH " BUILDING." 559 

But, independently of these analogies, we have several com- 
binations in which even the purists, who condemn the phrase in 
question, employ precisely the same form, and that, too, not with 
a verbal noun, but with a true participle. To owe, to miss, to 
wcmt, are all transitive verbs ; but no Englishman scruples to 
speak of debts owing, to say that a paper is missing, or that a 
sovereign is wanting * to make up a specified sum. 

The reformers who object to the phrase I am defending, must, 
in consistency, employ the proposed substitute with all passive 
participles, and in other tenses, as well as the present. They 
must say therefore : The subscription-paper is being missed, but 
I know that a considerable sum is being wanted to make up the 
amount ; the great Yictoria bridge has been being built more than 
two years ; when I reach London, the ship Leviathan will be be- 
ing built ; if my orders had been followed, the coat would have 
been being made yesterday ; if the house had then been being 
built, the mortar would have been being mixed. 

Besides these cases of active verbal forms with a passive sense, 
we have nouns of similar character. Confessw, for example, ana- 
logically ought to mean one who confesses ; whereas it signifies a 
priest who is confessed to / prisons should be a man who im- 
prisons, but it signifies one who is imprisoned. There are even ex- 
amples of passive participles with an active sense. A well-spoken, 
or a fair-spoken man, is a man who speaks well or smoothly ; 
and well-seen in a science not long since meant seeing far into, 
having a deep insight into, that science. All languages are full 
of these anomalies ; and he who resolves to utter or write noth- 
ing which he cannot parse, will find himself restricted to a beg- 
garly diction. 

The employment of active forms with a passive sense, and con- 
trariwise, the attribution of an active force to passive inflections, 
are sanctioned by the analogy of all the languages to which Eng- 

* These expressions are all old. The first occurs in a letter from Henry VII. 
to his mother, written certainly as early as 1508 : " Ye * * have graunted 
unto me * * such debts and duties which is oiceing and dew to you, &c." 
— Fisher's Sermon on Countess of Derby, Appendix, p. 38. 

Wanting is several times used by Palsgrave in a similar way ; as, " though 
any fewe wordes * * shall fortune * * * to be wantyng"; and, 
"which he * * shall suppose to be wantyng." — Palsgrave, 868. 



560 NEW PARTICIPIAL CONSTRUCTIONS. [Lect. xxix. 

lish is related. Not to mention exceptional cases, the Latins regu- 
larly employed the gerundial both actively and passively; the 
Latin deponent and the Greek middle voice, passive in form, are 
active in sense ; the Icelandic active participle is nsed gerundially 
asa passive; as ecki er truanda, it is not to be believed ; in 
some, at least, of the Frisic dialects, the same construction is used, 
tha drivanda and tha draganda, the driving, and the car- 
rying, meaning live cattle which can be driven, and lifeless arti- 
cles which can be carried ; the Danes say, blsesendelnstru- 
m e n t e r, blowing instruments, for instruments that are blown, 
wind instruments ; and, in spite of the grammarians, few Ger- 
mans would hesitate to say, with Liebig, eine zu begriind- 
ende Wissenschaft, a science founded, or to be founded, 
&c.;* or to speak of das zu beziehende Haus, the house to 
be occupied, eine vorhabende Reise, a journey to be un- 
dertaken, while verdienter and Bedienter, participle passive 
forms are constantly used actively, the one as an adjective, the 
other as a noun. 

Upon the whole, then, we may say, that the construction ' the 
house is building ' is sustained by the authority of usage, and by 
many analogies in the English and cognate languages. Nor is it 
objectionable as an equivocal phrase, because it is very seldom 
used when the subject is of such a nature that it can be an agent, 
and always with a context, or under circumstances which show 
that the participle must be taken in a passive sense. 

To reject it, therefore, is to violate the laws of language by an 
arbitrary change ; and, in this particular case, the proposed sub- 
stitute is at war with the genius of the English tongue. 

But if an innovation in the established phraseology of the last 
two centuries must be made, either for the sake of change, or 
with the view of harmonizing English syntax to the eye, let us at 

* Es giebt in der That Aerzte und medicinische Schrif tsteller welche behaup- 
ten dass eine auf exacte Kenntniss zu begriindende Wissenschaft der 
diatetischen und medicinischen Praxis unmoglich sei. Leibig, Chem. Briefe 
4te. Auflage, I. 17. 

Other examples of the use of active forms with a passive sense, in French 
and German, are the Fr. voyant, as applied to colors, in the signification of 
showy, conspicuous, ' ' le texte n'est par encore fini d'imprimer," Lettre 
de Clavier a P. L. Courier, 3 Sept. 1809 ; Diese Stadt * * * * ist zu bauen 
angefangen. Berghatjs, Was man von der Erde weiss, I. 876. 



Lect. xxix.] NEW PAETICIPIAL CONSTEUCTIONS. 561 

once cast off the fear of ignorant criticism and the sneers of pre- 
cisian affectation, go back to the primitive construction, which 
the popular good sense and grammatical instincts of humble Eng- 
lish lif e have still preserved, and say, with our fathers — ' the ark 
was a preparing,' ' the house was in building,' ' I go a fishing,' 
'he goes a begging.' 

The participial form is, in most languages, a stumbling-block,* 
and the resemblance between that part of speech and the verbal 
adjective is a constant source of embarrassment. How subtle 
and difficult of application are the rules for determining when the 
active participle in French is to be treated as a form of the verb, 
and so not declined, and when as an adjective, and accordingly 
to be varied for gender and number. And in French and Italian, 
how hard to know when the participle in the compound tenses is 
declinable, and when not ! We have not the same, but analo- 
gous, difficulties in our own words of the same class. There is a 
large number of both active or present, and past or passive par- 
ticiples, which use has converted into adjectives, and their syntax 
has been modified accordingly. To the employment of those 
to which the ear has been familiarized by practice, we are recon- 
ciled, but we instinctively shrink from every new attempt to con- 
found words of these two classes. There is at present an inclina- 
tion in England to increase the number of active, in America, of 
passive participles, employed with the syntax of the adjective. 
Thus, in England it is common to hear : " such a thing is very 
damaging" and the phrase has been recently introduced into 
this country. Trench says : " Words which had become unintel- 
ligible or misleading" and " the phrase could not have been other 
than more or less misleading "; " these are the most serious and 
most recurring." Now, though pleasing, gratifying, encourag- 
ing, and many other like words have long been established as ad- 
jectives, yet the cases cited from Trench strike us as unpleasant 
novelties. The rule appears to be this : Where there exists an 
adjective of corresponding meaning, we cannot employ the parti- 
ciple as an adjective ; but if there is no such adjective, the parti- 
ciple may take its place. To apply this : we ought not to say 

* Query for the purists : Ought I rather to say, A block-that is-being-stum- 
bled-at ? 

24* 



562 SHALL ANT> WILL. [Lect. xxix. 

very damaging ', because we have the adjective injurious ; or 
very recurring, because we hsLve freque?it. But we may em- 
ploy gratifying and encouraging as adjectives, because there are 
no English adjectives with the same meaning. Upon the same 
principle, we may justify the use of misleading with an adjecti- 
val syntax, for, though it has a raw and unpleasant savor, it is 
objectionable only because it is new. 

Many past or rather passive participles have long been em- 
ployed as adjectives, and it is difficult to lay down a rule for dis- 
tinguishing between them. A practical criterion is the applica- 
tion of the adverb very, which we use to qualify adjectives, not 
participles, except when the latter have become adjectives ; thus 
we say 'I am very happy] but not 'I am very delighted' '; 
though very tired, very learned, and the like, are freely employed. 
The inclination in this country is to enlarge the list of these 
words, and we not unfrequently hear such expressions as i very 
satisfied,' ' very pleased.' It is not easy to see why we may say 
' a tired man,' ' a learned man,' ' he is very tired or very learned '; 
but, on the other hand, while we use the phrase ' a disappointed 
man,' we cannot say ' he is very disappointed,' though he is £ very 
much disappointed ' is an idiomatic phrase. 

The more frequent employment of both the participles with an 
adjectival syntax, is, in its origin, a Gallicism, but it also exem- 
plifies the prevailing inclination to reject purely grammatical dis- 
tinctions, and to simplify our grammar, by assimilating forms 
and phrases which suggest no substantial difference of sense, 
while we are at the same time increasing our power of expression 
by enlarging our vocabulary, and more nicely discriminating be- 
tween words of like general meaning. 

It is doubtless an improvement in any language to increase the 
significance of its vocabulary, and to make the meaning of a 
period depend more on the inherent force, and less on the form 
and arrangement, of the words that compose it ; and therefore, 
though every man of taste will prefer to follow rather than to 
lead in linguistic changes, yet there is no sound objection to the 
tendencies of which I am speaking, except the repulsive elf ect of 
all neologisms in syntax. 

The same observation will apply to another grammatical sub- 
tlety, which, whatever may be its origin, has at present no logical 



Lect. xxix.] IN EESPECT OF. 563 

value or significance whatever. I refer to the distinction between 
io ill and shall, as used with different personal pronouns, whether 
as signs of the future, or as forms of determination or authority. 
I shall, you loill, and he will, are generally simply futures, pre- 
dictions ; and icill and shall are true auxiliaries. I will, you 
shall, and he shall, are expressions of determination ; and will 
and shall are not true auxiliaries. No very satisfactory explana- 
tion of a distinction apparently so arbitrary has been given, 
though some ingenious suggestions as to the origin of it have 
been offered ; but, whatever foundation may once have existed 
for this nicety, it now answers no intellectual purpose. In Scot- 
land, and in many parts of the United States, will and shall are 
confounded, or at least not employed according to the established 
English usage. There is little risk in predicting that at no very 
distant day, this verbal quibble will disappear, and that one of 
the auxiliaries will be employed with all persons of the nomina- 
tive, exclusively as the sign of the future, and the other only as 
an expression of purpose or authority. To persons accustomed 
to be scrupulous in the use of these words, the confusion or ir- 
regular employment of them is one of the most disagreeable of 
all departures from the English idiom ; but as the subtlety in 
question serves no end but to embarrass, the rejection of it, ac- 
companied with a constant distinction in meaning between the 
two words, must be deemed not a corruption, but a rational im- 
provement. 

It is impossible, in a single lecture, to notice in detail the thou- 
sand violations of grammatical propriety which are constantly 
springing up, and which are threatening to pervert and denatu- 
ralize our mother tongue ; but the deliberate introduction of in- 
correct forms, whether by the coinage of new, or the revival of 
obsolete and inexpressive syntactical combinations, ought to be 
resisted even in trifles, especially where it leads to the confusion 
of distinct ideas. An example of this is the recent use of the ad- 
verbial phrases in respect of, in regard of, for in or with respect 
or regard to. This innovation is without any syntactical ground, 
and ought to be condemned and avoided as a mere grammatical 
crotchet. 

The writers of the seventeenth century used these expressions 
in three senses: First, for 'in, comjpai^ison with'; as, the ex- 



564 IN EESPECT OF. [Lect. xxix. 

penses of the government are small, in respect of its revenue ; 
secondly, for ' by reason of J or i on account of; as, in respect of 
our ignorance and frailty, we ought to be humble ; and finally, as 
a mode of introducing a subject, limiting a general proposition, or 
referring to a particular point, in which case it was equivalent to 
the phrases ' as to,' ' in reference to? ' respecting? ' so far as con- 
cerns? &c* The first use, that expressive of comparison, soon 
became obsolete, and has not been revived. The form, in respect 
or regard of was then confined to the meaning by reason of, on 
account of ; and in or with respect or regard to was employed in 
the sense of in reference to, respecting. This employment of 
these latter two forms had become well settled, though the first 
of them was seldom employed except in the dialect of the law. 
Coleridge was the first eminent writer of this century who re- 
turned to the practice of using ' in respect of ' exclusively ; but 
his writings never had sufficient currency to produce much in- 
fluence on the language. Since his time, however, some de- 
servedly popular writers have employed this phrase ; and with 
Trench it is a pet construction, and often introduced when a very 
different phrase would much better express its meaning. It rests, 
of course, on the theory that in this phrase, respect or regard is 
an independent noun, and therefore should be followed by the 
preposition of But this, I think, is a mistaken view of the sub- 
ject. The word respect in this combination has none of the 
meanings known to it as an independent noun, in the English vo- 
cabulary. The expression ' in or with respect ' is an idiotism, a 

* First sense, of " comparison ": 

The Warres of Latter Ages seeme to be made in the Darke, in respect of the 
glory and honour which reflected upon men from the Wars in ancient Time. 
Bacon's Essays, 1639, Essay xxix. Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms. 

Second sense, "by reason," or, " on account of ": 

The Northern tract of the World is in nature the more martial Region : be 
it in respect of the Stars of that Hemisphere, * * * or of the cold of the 
Northern parts, which * * * doth make the bodies hardest and the cour- 
age warmest. Do., do., Essay lviii. Of Vicissitudes of Things. 

Third sense, "relatively to," or, "with reference to": 

Timing of the Sute is the principal ; Timing, I say, not onely in respect of 
the Person that should grant it, but in respect of those which are like to crosse it. 

Do., do., Essay xlix. Of Suitors. 

See also Haven of Health. 



Lect. xxix.] IIS" EESPECT OF. 565 

phraseological construction of an adverbial character, and in its 
ordinary modern use, it is the equivalent of relatively. Old 
writers sometimes say ' respectively to.' This is now disused ; 
but ' relatively to ' is by no means unfrequent, and ' in respect off 
used in this sense, is just as gross a violation of English grammar 
as to write ' relatively of, or in reference of.' 

The mere violation of a grammatical rule would be a compara- 
tively small evil ; but most of the writers who have adopted this 
innovation, are so anxious to parade it as a badge of the style of a 
school, that they drag it in on all occasions where they can by 
any chance contrive to introduce it, very often employing it in 
constructions that leave it difficult to determine whether they 
mean relatively to, or by reason of, or in point of; and the 
vague use of the phrase, of course, tends to embarrass the reader 
by confounding in expression things logically very distinct.* 

The two changes which I have now been considering, are not 
of popular but of scholastic origin, and they are wholly the fruit 
of an affectation of superior correctness. But there is, among the 
novelties I have referred to, one which originated with the mul- 
titude, and has a psychological foundation, though it is too much 
at variance with the general analogy of the language to deserve 
countenance. I refer to the use of the word community without 
the article, when not employed in the sense of in common y as, 
for example, 'Community is interested in the question'; 'the 
policy is injurious to community.'' So far as I am aware, no re- 
spectable writer has sanctioned this form of speech, and it is 
justly regarded as a very gross vulgarism ; but I could name per- 
sons of some position in the literary world, who employ it collo- 
quially. The general rule is, that common nouns employed 
in a definite sense in the singular number, must take the article. 
Thus, in the first of the instances just given, though ignorant 
people, and some who are not ignorant except in this particular, 
say ' Community is interested in the question,' no one would say, 

* Nobody ever thinks of saying, " in reference of"; but if these phrases are 
to be governed by the rules of English construction of nouns, there is as good 
ground for this expression as for "in respect of." The Latin etymology of 
respect has nothing to do with the question, for the Latin primitive was not 
used for any such purpose, or in any such construction ; and the phrase in 
question is strictly an English idiotism. 



566 OMISSION OF AETICLE. [Lect. xxix, 

' Public is interested in the question.' The philological instinct 
of every English-speaking man would be shocked at the omission 
of the article, and would correct the phrase by supplying it, ' The 
public is interested.' Now, the grammatical category of the 
words community and public in these examples is the same. 
Why, then, do some ears demand the article in one case, and re- 
ject it in the other? The explanation is this. When we per- 
sonify common nouns used definitely in the singular number, we 
may omit the article. Thus Holy Church, not the Holy Church, 
was constantly used by old writers, because the church was in- 
vested with personality, regarded as a thinking, acting, authorita- 
tive entity. For the same reason, Parliament, and in England, 
Ministers, used instead of the ministry, do not take the article ; 
nor, according to present usage, does Congress, as applied to our 
National Legislature; and in the ecclesiastical proceedings of 
some religious denominations, Convention and Synod are em- 
ployed in the same way, on the same principle. With respect to 
Congress, the omission of the article is recent, for during the 
Ee volution, while the Federal Government was a body of doubt- 
ful authority and permanence, and not yet familiar to the people 
as a great continuing, constitutive, and ordaining power, the 
phrase used was commonly ' the Congress,' and such is the form 
of expression in the Constitution itself. But when the Govern- 
ment became consolidated, and Congress was recognized as the 
paramount legislative power of the Union, the embodiment of the 
national will, it was personified and the article dropped, and in 
like manner, the word Government is often used in the same 
way. Now in our time, as I have often had occasion to remark, 
society has become more intensely social, the feeling of union 
and of mutual interest, the consciousness of reciprocal right and 
duty, are strengthened, and the body of the nation is more 
habitually regarded as a homogeneous self-conscious agent. 
Hence, what we call ' the community ' is conceived of as a being, 
not as a thing ; as an organic combination, a person in short, not 
as an assemblage of unrelated individuals. Accordingly, the 
word community is beginning to take the syntax of personal and 
personified nouns, and to reject the article, while public, which 
we employ in a sense implying less of common feeling and com- 
mon interest than Latin usage ascribed to it, is uniformly con- 



Lect. xxix.] ANCIENT LITEEATUEE. 567 

strued with the article. The omission of the article before this 
noun, though not defensible, is not without a show of reason, and 
deserves less condemnation than ' is being built ' and ' in respect 
of,' which are, with most of those who use them, at best but 
philological coxcombries. 

The history of the classical languages and literature affords 
little encouragement to those who hope for further substantial 
improvement in the English speech, or even to those who are 
striving to arrest its degeneracy and decay. The tongues of 
Hellas and Rome had each but a single era of vigor and perfec- 
tion ; and the creative literature of Greece extends over a period 
but a hundred years longer than that which has elapsed since 
Chaucer sang. Six centuries comprise all that has made the Gre- 
cian intellect immortal. Roman literature, essentially borrowed, 
or at least imitative, and commencing only after the oracles of 
Hellenic genius had ceased to give responses, nourished but 
half as long. So, in modern times, Italy was but three hundred 
years a power in the world of letters, and Spain had scarcely a 
longer age of intellectual activity. Germany, on the contrary, 
has an old literature, and a new, a Mbelungenlied, and after six 
centuries, again a Faust; and the present century ajfords evi- 
dence that the mind of the Anglican race is rousing itself to win 
new prizes in the arena of letters. There was one cause of de- 
cadence in the classical languages, which does not exist in those 
of the modern Gothic stock. Greece and Rome had no foreign 
fountains from which to draw, when their own were waxing tur- 
bid and dry, no old literature, no record of a primitive, half -forgot- 
ten language, no long-neglected but rich mine of linguistic wealth 
whence the unwrought ores of speech could yet be extracted ; 
and hence their literature died, because their tongues were con- 
sumed, their material exhausted. If such a fate awaits the 
genius and the language of the Anglican people, it is but the 
common lot of all things human; but we are nevertheless far 
from the day when the resources of our maternal speech will all 
have been made available, and when nothing but stereotyped 
repetition will be left for our writers. The Saxon legions which 
the Norman irruption drove from the field may yet be rallied ; 
and, with the renovation of our language, we may still hope for 
a blessing which was denied to Hellas and Latium : the revival 
of the glories of a national literature. 



LECTUEE XXX. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMEEICA. 

The English language in America is necessarily much affected 
by the multitude of new objects, processes, and habits of life that 
qualify our material existence in this new world, which, with 
sometimes incongruous architecture, we are building up out of 
the raw stock that nature has given us ; by the great influx of 
foreigners speaking different languages or dialects, who, in adopt- 
ing our speech, cannot fail to communicate to it some of the 
peculiarities of their own ;* by climatic and other merely ma- 
terial causes which affect the action of the organs of articulation, 
and of course the form of spoken words ; by the generally dif- 
fused habit of reading, which makes pronunciation and phrase 

*A striking instance of the transfer of accent and intonation from one 
speech to another came under my own personal observation some years since. 
While travelling in one of the long American railway carriages which convey 
many passengers in a single compartment, I noticed two respectably dressed 
women who occupied seats at some distance from my own, and who were 
keeping up a lively conversation in a language unintelligible to me. Many of 
the words they used seemed much like English, many others, though not 
High or Low Dutch, or Scandinavian, might possibly have been of the Gothic 
stock, and I concluded that the women were using some Germanic dialect not 
familiar to me. My curiosity was piqued, and I thought it not a breach of 
good manners to exchange my seat for a nearer position in order to ascertain 
what language they were speaking. The tones and modulations of then- voices 
were so exactly alike that I could not distinguish between them, but after lis- 
tening a few minutes I made out enough of the dialogue to learn that the two 
women were sisters, one just arrived from the Scotch Highlands, the other an 
emigrant who had been in the United States some years. The new-comer, 
though understanding English, did not speak it ; the other, without having 
forgotten her native tongue, had been long enough in America to have lost 
her fluency in the use of it, and in their conversation each was speaking the 
language most familiar to her, though the native intonation and accent were 
no less marked in the one than in the other. 

(568) ) 



Lect. xxx.] LANGUAGE UNIFORM IN AMERICA. 569 

more formal and also more uniform; and doubtless by other 
more obscure and yet undetected causes. 

Tims far, it can by no means be said that any distinct dialectic 
difference has established itself between England and the United 
States ; and it is a trite observation, that, though very few Ameri- 
cans speak as well as the educated classes of Englishmen, yet not 
only is the average English used here, both in speaking and writ- 
ing, better than that of the great mass of the English people, but 
there are fewer local peculiarities of form and articulation in our 
vast extent of territory than on the comparatively narrow soil of 
Great Britain. In spite of disturbing and distracting causes, Eng- 
lish is more emphatically one in America than in its native land ; 
and if we have engrafted on our mother-speech some wide-spread 
corruptions, we have very nearly freed the language, in our use 
of it, from some vulgar and disagreeable peculiarities exceedingly 
common in England. 

So far as any tendency to divergence between the two countries 
exists, it manifests itself at present rather in the spoken than in 
the written dialect, in pronunciation rather than in vocabulary and 
grammatical structure. It can hardly be denied that a marked 
difference of accent is already observable ; but, though a very 
few words current on one side of the Atlantic are either obsolete 
or not yet introduced upon the other, it would be difficult to 
frame a written sentence, which would be pronounced good Eng- 
lish by competent judges in America, and condemned as unidi- 
omatic in England. 

Some noticeable local and general differences between American 
and British English may be explained by the fact, that consider- 
able bodies of Englishmen sometimes emigrated from the same 
vicinity, and that in their new home they and their multiplied 
descendants have kept together and continued to employ dialectic 
peculiarities of their native speech, or retained words of general 
usage, which elsewhere perished. Thus the inhabitants of East- 
ern Yirginia were early settlers, and have intermixed little 
with the descendants of other colonists or strangers. Hence, 
they are said to retain some Shakespearean words not popu- 
larly known in other American or even English districts ; 
and the dialect of Southeastern Massachusetts, which is inhab- 
ited by the unmixed progeny of the first immigrants, is marked 



570 COLLOQUIALISMS. [Lect. xxx. 

by corresponding individualities. It is to the influence of such 
causes that we owe some excellent words that have now become 
universal in the United States, as, for example, the verb to wilt 
— a word which has strangely been suffered to perish in England 
without leaving any substitute or equivalent behind it. 

In the use of colloquialisms not only tolerated but preferred in 
conversation, though scarcely allowable in writing, the two na- 
tions differ considerably. What our own self-indulgences are, in 
this respect, it is difficult for an American to say, because he be- 
comes conscious of them, as national peculiarities, only when his 
attention is called to them by criticisms which good-breeding sel- 
dom permits' an Englishman to make. In England, on the other 
hand, an educated American hears, in the best circles, familiar 
expressions and grammatical licenses which he would himself not 
venture to employ in America. For instance, he will most fre- 
quently hear it is me, and even it is him, instead of it is I, it is 
he. Some English grammarians think the former of these ex- 
pressions defensible ; and, in the analogy of the French and Dan- 
ish languages, where the corresponding forms are not merely al- 
lowable but obligatory, there lies an argument of some weight ; 
but this apparent grammatical solecism is not sanctioned by 
Anglo-Saxon usage, nor by the authority of good writers. What 
will this cost to print f would perhaps not strike an American 
oddly, but he would himself say : What will it cost to print 
this f Blunt and dull are distinct in America, Hunt being ap- 
plied only to the penetrating point, and dull to the cutting edge 
of an instrument. They now seem to be used indiscriminately 
in England, though they were formerly distinguished, as appears 
from Shakespeare : Bich. III. iv. 4. Starve, which in England 
is applied to extreme suffering either from cold or hunger, is 
used in America only in reference to the latter. In the United 
States coal is employed where the English use coals. An Eng- 
lishman would perhaps say : The coal in a mine, but he always 
speaks of this substance as coals, however great the quantity, 
when it is broken up so as to be ready for use. "We, on the other 
hand, never employ the plural form except as applied to frag- 
ments in actual combustion.* 

* I have noticed in some rather recent English periodicals certain words 
which I do not remember to have seen or heard among us. In an obituary 



Lect. xxx. 1 GKAMMATICAL DIFFERENCES. 571 

The most important peculiarity of American English is a laxity, 
irregularity, and confusion in the use of particles. The same 
thing is, indeed, observable in England, but not to the same ex- 
tent, though some gross departures from idiomatic propriety, 
such as different to, for different from, are common in England, 
which none but very ignorant persons would be guilty of in 
America. These may seem trifling matters, and in languages 
abounding in inflections they might be so ; but in a syntax, de- 
pending, like ours, so much upon the right use of participles, 
strict accuracy in this particular becomes seriously important. 

In the tenses of the verbs, I am inclined to think that well- 
educated Americans conform more closely to grammatical pro- 
priety than the corresponding class in England. At least, the 
proper use of the compound preterite is more generally with us. 
In English writers of some pretensions, we meet such phrases as 
' this plate has ~been engraved by Albert Diirer,' ' this palace has 
oeen designed by Michael Angelo,' for was engraved, was de- 
signed. Such an abuse of the proper office of the preterite is 
never heard in America. In general, I think we may say, that 
in point of naked syntactical accuracy, the English of America 
is not at all inferior to that of England ; but we do not discrimi- 
nate so precisely in the meaning of words, nor do we habitually, 
in either conversation or in writing, express ourselves so grace- 
fully, or employ so classic a diction as do the English. Our 
taste in language is less fastidious, and our licenses and inaccura- 
cies are more frequently of a character indicative of want of re- 
finement and elegant culture, than those we hear in educated 
society in England. 

notice of De Morgan, in the Athenaeum of March 25, 1871, paradoxer and 
paradoxist are used for one who maintains paradoxes. In the same periodical 
of May 5, 1871, I find this phrase: Caligraphic evidence has seemed to de- 
monstrate that Lady Temple at least handwrote the Junian Letters. In Nature, 
March, 1871, there is a notice of a Paper read before the Anthropological 
Society of Great Britain and Ireland, entitled : On the Racial aspects of the 
Franco-German War ; and the word racial frequently occurs in the Abstracts 
of the same Scientific Journal. Most words of this kind, however, cross the 
Atlantic so rapidly that it is often difficult to be certain of their true nation- 
ality. Even the honor of the parentage of certain slang phrases is disputable, 
and many an American has been astonished to hear from an English acquaint- 
ance an expression of this character — utterly new to him, and very un-Ameri- 
can besides — followed by : " As you say in America." 



572 PKONUNCIATION. [Lect. xxx. 

The causes of the differences in pronunciation are partly cli- 
matic, and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to resist; and 
partly owing to a difference of circumstances. Of this latter 
class of influences, the universality of reading in America is the 
most obvious and important. The most marked difference is, 
perhaps, in the length, or prosodical quantity, of the vowels ; and 
both the causes I have mentioned concur to produce this effect. 
We are said to drawl our words by protracting the vowels, and 
giving them a more diphthongal sound than the English. Now, 
an Englishman who reads, will habitually utter his vowels more 
fully and distinctly than his countryman who does not; and, 
upon the same principle, a nation of readers, like the Americans, 
will pronounce more deliberately and clearly than a people, so 
large a proportion of whom are unable to read, as in England. 
Erom our universal habit of reading, there results not only a 
greater distinctness of articulation, but a strong tendency to as- 
similate the spoken to the written language.* Thus Americans 
incline to give to every syllable of a written word a distinct 
enunciation ; and the popular habit is to say dic-tion-<wy, mil-it- 
ar-y, with a secondary accent on the penultimate, instead of 
sinking the third syllable, as is so common in England. There 
is no doubt something disagreeably stiff in an anxious and affect- 
ed conformity to the -very letter of orthography ; and to those 
accustomed to a more hurried utterance, we may seem to drawl 
when we are only giving a full expression to letters, which, 
though etymologically important, the English habitually slur 
over, sputtering out, as a Swedish satirist says, one-half of the 
word and swallowing the other. The tendency to make the long 

* That this tendency exists to some extent in England also, even in the most 
conservative classes, I infer from the following anecdote. Some years since 
a letter of introduction from an English friend was handed me by another 
English gentleman, and in this letter the writer took the trouble to give me 
the proper English pronunciation of the name of the person introduced, this 
pronunciation not being in conformity with the spelling Of course I was 
careful to address my new acquaintance as advised, but, to my surprise, when 
this gentleman spoke of his wife, he called her Lacly exactly in con- 
formity with the spelling of the name. On my asking for an explanation, 

this* answer was given : " Oh, yes, we were always called formerly, but 

it is so unlike the spelling that it seems like an affectation in these days, and 
we now prefer to conform the pronunciation of our name more to its orthog- 
raphy." 



Lect. xxx.] PRONUNCIATION. " 573 

vowels diphthongal is noticed by foreigners as a peculiarity of the 
orthoepy of onr language ; and this tendency will, of course, be 
strengthened by any cause which produces greater slowness and 
fulness of articulation. Besides the influence of the habit of 
reading, there is some reason to think that climate is affecting 
our articulation. In spite of the greater coldness of our winters, 
our flora shows that the climate of even our Northern States be- 
longs, upon the whole, to a more Southern type than that of 
England. In Southern latitudes, at least within the temperate 
zone, articulation is generally much more distinct than in North- 
ern regions. Witness the pronunciation of Spanish, Italian, 
Turkish, as compared with English, Danish, and German. Par- 
ticipating, then, in the physical influences of a Southern climate, 
we have contracted something of the more distinct articulation 
that belongs to a dry atmosphere, and a clear sky. And this 
view of the case is confirmed by the fact that the inhabitants 
of our Southern States incline, like the people of Southern 
Europe, to throw the accent towards the end of the word ; and 
thus, like all nations that use that accentuation, bring out all the 
syllables. This we observe very commonly in the comparative 
Northern and Southern pronunciation of proper names. I might 
exemplify by citing familiar instances ; but, lest that should be 
invidious, it may suffice to say that, not to mention more im 
portant changes, many a Northern member of Congress goes to 
Washington a dactyl or a trochee, and comes home an avnjphi- 
brach or an iambus. Why or how external physical causes, as 
climate and modes of life, should affect pronunciation, we cannot 
say ; but it is evident that material influences of some sort are 
producing a change in our bodily constitution, and we are fast 
acquiring a distinct national Anglo-American type. That the 
delicate organs of articulation should participate in such tenden- 
cies, is altogether natural ; and the operation of the causes which 
give rise to them, is palpable even in our hand-writing, which, if 
not uniform with itself, is generally so unlike common English 
script as to be readily distinguished from it. 

To. the joint operation, then, of these two causes, universal 
reading and climatic influences, we must ascribe our habit of 
dwelling upon vowel and diphthongal sounds, or drawling, if that 
term be insisted upon. This peculiarity, it must be admitted, is 



574 PKOISTUNCIATION. [Lect. xxx. 

extremely disagreeable, particularly to a delicate and fastidious 
native ear, to which long familiarity has rendered the language 
sufficiently intelligible even when not pronounced with marked 
distinctness ; but it is often noticed by foreigners as both making 
us more readily understood by them in speaking our own tongue, 
and as connected with a flexibility of organ which enables us to 
acquire a better pronunciation of other languages than is usual 
with Englishmen.* In any case, as, in spite of the old adage, 
speech is given us that we may make ourselves understood, our 
drawling, however prolonged, is preferable to the nauseous, 
foggy, mumbling thickness of articulation which characterizes 
the cockney, and is not unfrequently affected by Englishmen of 
a better class. 

It is to the same tendency to a prolonged and consequently 
distinct pronunciation of the vowels, that we are to ascribe the 
general retention of some, and the partial preservation of other, 
vowel sounds in America, now pretty uniformly banished out of 
the orthoepy of English, writers on pronunciation, though not 
yet quite out of the actual speoch of the British people. One 
of these is the sound of o in none, intermediate between the 
participle known and the noun nun. This is rather peculiar to 
'New England, and is used in coat, which is not made to rhyme 
with quote or boat, and in many other words. The other is the 
long e in there, which "Walker and his sequela make identical 
with a in fate. This latter sound, as I have before remarked, is 
by most Continental phonologists justly regarded at distinct from 
the a in fate, and as properly the long vowel corresponding 
to the short a in carry / but it seems destined to extinction, and 
America is in this respect following the example of England. 

* The influence of the habit of full and distinct articulation in the orthoepy 
of the native language upon our pronunciation of foreign tongues, is well ex- 
emplified in the readiness with which Italians acquire a good English accent. 
None of the Bomance, or even Gothic nations, learn to speak English so well 
as the Italians. The same remark applies with great force to the Turks. The 
articulation of Turkish is so distinct, that upon first hearing it, you follow the 
speaker, syllable by syllable. The Turks acquire the sounds of .foreign 
tongues with great facility. The common seal -engravers of Constantinople, 
upon hearing a foreign name, will at once repeat it, and write it down for en- 
graving, with as close a conformity to the true pronunciation as the Arabic 
alphabet admits of. 



Lect. xxx.] PKONUNCIATIOST. 575 

There is, in many parts of the United States, a strange con- 
fusion with regard to the use of the letter r. Indeed, scarcely 
any consonantal sound undergoes so many modifications in pro- 
nunciation in different countries as this. In some languages it is 
pronounced with a vibration of the uvula, and is at the same 
time distinctly guttural ; in others, it is articulated with a rapid 
vibration of the tongue, and a strong emission of the breath ; in 
the Sandwich Islands it is scarcely distinguishable from I* and 
though marked by the rough breathing in some parts of the 
British islands, in others it is but an aspiration almost as inarticu- 
late as h. The Eomans called this consonant the litera canina, 
the snarling letter, and the modern Italians pronounce it with a 
very forcible trill. I believe the pronunciation I mentioned as 
characteristic of some American districts, is not peculiar to the 
United States, but occurs also in England. It consists in sup- 
pressing the r where it should be heard, and adding it where it 
should not. One need not go a day's journey from E"ew York 
to find educated persons who call the municipal rule of action 
the lor, and yet style the passage from one room to another a 
oZoah. 

Analogous to this are two English vulgarisms, from which we 
are almost wholly free. No American young lady laments that 
she " never knows when to hexasperate the haitch " ; nor is any 
cis-atlantic Weller embarrassed as to whether he shall spell veal 
with a we. To ears accustomed to discriminate between the 
use and omission of the h, and between the letters v and w, it 
seems strange that they can ever be confounded ; but I believe 
they are nowhere so clearly distinguished as in the United States. 
The Greeks and Romans, as I have observed in a former lecture, 
had the same embarrassment as the vulgar English with respect 
to the A; and it finally disappeared from the articulation of the 
Southern Romance languages altogether. Were it not for the 
influence of printing, the rough breathing of the h would prob- 
ably long before this have ceased to be heard in English ; and it 
is to the same cause alone that we are to ascribe the perpetuation 



* This peculiar articulation of r is found also in dialects of Sardinia, and in 
some districts on the Italo-Swiss Alpine frontier. A foreign ear finds it diffi- 
cult to decide whether the natives say Kirche or Kilche. 



576 TENDENCIES TO DIYEEGENCE. [Lect. xxx. 

of tlie distinction between the v and the w, one or the other of 
which has become obsolete in the pronunciation of most lan- 
guages which originally possessed them both. 

But to return : there are other differences between our Amer- 
can accent and that of the English, which are as yet too fleeting 
and subtile to admit of definition ; and in fact we differ as widely 
among ourselves in this particular as any of us do from the peo- 
ple of Great Britain. So far as these shades of articulation can 
be characterized, they seem to me to lie chiefly in the intonation ; 
and I think no Eastern man can hear a native of the Mississippi 
Yalley use the O vocative, or observe the Southern pronuncia- 
tion of ejaculatory or other emphatic phrases, without perceiving 
a very marked, though often indescribable, difference between 
their and our utterance of the same things. 

The integrity, and the future harmonious development of our 
common Anglican speech in England and America, are threatened 
by a multitude of disturbing influences. Language, being a liv- 
ing organic thing, is, by the very condition of its vital existence, 
by the law of life itself, necessarily always in a progressive, or at 
least a fluctuating state. To fix it, therefore, to petrify it into 
immutable forms, is impossible ; and, were it possible, would be 
fatal to it as a medium of intercommunication suited to the ever- 
changeful life of man. At the same time, something can and 
should be done to check its propensity to wandering growth, and 
especially the too rapid divergence of what may ultimately be- 
come the two great dialects of the English tongue. At present, 
the predominance of the commercial and the political over the 
social relations of the two countries, makes the unity of our writ- 
ten speech especially important ; but the wonderful increase in 
.the facilities of travel, destined perhaps to be superseded by other 
still swifter conveyances, is constantly multiplying the means and 
the occasions of personal communication between the two peoples ; 
and, indeed, we are already in time, almost in space, nearer to 
England than to the remoter borders of our own wide-spread em- 
pire. The sea is, even now, no longer what Horace found the 
Adriatic — a gulf of dissociation — but a bond of union, a pathway 
of rapid intercommunion, and with increased frequency of indi- 
vidual intercourse, grows also the importance of the identity of 
our spoken tongue. Let me, therefore, express my entire dissent 



Lect. xxx.] TENDENCIES TO DIYEKGENCE. 577 

from the views of those who would imbitter the rivalries of com- 
merce by the jealousies of a discordant dialect — who would hasten 
the process of separation between the stock and the offshoot, and 
cut off the sons of the Pilgrim and the Cavalier from their com- 
mon inheritance in Chaucer and Spenser, and Bacon and Shake- 
speare, and Milton and Fuller, by Americanizing, and conse- 
quently denaturalizing, the language in which our forefathers 
have spoken, and prayed, and sung, for a thousand years. If we 
cannot prevent so sad a calamity, let us not voluntarily accelerate 
it. Let us not, with mahce prepense, go about to republicanize 
our orthography and our syntax, our grammars and our diction- 
aries, our nursery hymns and our Bibles, until, by the force of 
irresistible influences, our language shall have revolutionized it- 
self. When our own metaphysical inquiries shall establish a wiser 
philosophy than that of Bacon ; when a Columbian Shakespeare 
shall awake to create a new and transcendent genus of dramatic 
composition ; and when the necessities of a loftier inspiration 
shall impel our home-born bards to the framing of a nobler dic- 
tion than the poetic dialect of Albion, it will be soon enough 
to repudiate that community of speech, which, in spite of the 
keenly conflicting interests of politics and of commerce, makes us 
still one with the people of England. 

The inconveniences resulting from the existence of local dia- 
lects are very serious obstacles to national progress, to the growth 
of a comprehensive and enlightened patriotism, to the creation of 
a popular literature, and to the diffusion of general culture. In 
a state where the differences of speech are numerous and great, 
the community is divided into so many disjointed fragments, that 
the notion of a commonwealth can scarcely be developed ; for 
speech is the great medium of sympathy between man and man ; 
and even the animosities of rival religions are not more deep- 
seated and irreconcilable than the jealousies and repugnancies, 
which never fail to exist between neighboring peoples who have 
no common tongue. Where there are numerous dialects, but few 
can be so far cultivated as to possess a living literature, and many 
even will exist only in the form of unwritten speech. Poverty, 
want of opportunity, sectional pride, will prevent most of those 
who have no written language from acquiring the dialect of their 
more fortunate neighbors who possess a literature ; and but few 
25 



578 DIALECTS. [Lect. xxx. 

intelligent philanthropists will occupy themselves with the intel- 
lectual or the spiritual interests of those with whom, though of 
the same race and the same commonwealth, they can communi- 
cate only through an interpreter. "What we consider distortions 
of our mother-tongue are more offensive to us than the widest 
diversities between it and unallied languages ; and we regard 
a fellow-citizen, who speaks a marked provincial English, with a 
contempt and aversion which we do not bestow upon the for- 
eigner who speaks no English at all. The unhappy jealousies 
which have a hundred times defeated the hopes of Italian pa- 
triots, are very intimately connected with their differences of lan- 
guage. Every province, every great city, has its dialect, often 
unintelligible, always ridiculous, to the natives of a different lo- 
cality ; and one finds in the popular literature of Italy — as for 
instance in the Secchia Eapita — frequent exhibitions of a mutual 
hate, apparently imbittered quite as much by differences of 
speech, as by rivalries of interest. Of course, all educated per- 
sons know the Tuscan, which the great Florentines, Dante and 
Petrarch and Boccaccio, made the language of literature ; but, as 
Byron says, 

" Few Italians speak the right Etruscan "; 

and in Sicily, the people repudiate not only the Tuscan dialect 
but the Italian name. Fifteen or twenty of the provincial dia- 
lects have been reduced to writing, and more or less made known 
by the press ; but one only has become a medium of communica- 
tion beyond its own native borders. Every Italian, then, has two 
languages, one for his home, his fireside, his friends, the narrow 
plain or valley or mountain he calls his country ; another, for all 
the world without ; and he bestows the unkindly name of for- 
eigner upon even his brother Italian, when his speech bewrays 
him as a native of an adjacent province. 

The inconveniences of local dialects are infinite to the people 
of a country divided by them ; and nothing but personal observa- 
tion can enable us to realize the annoyances of a traveller, who, 
desiring to extend his observations beyond the sphere of the hotel 
and the museum, and to learn something of the rural and domes- 
tic life of the people, finds his curiosity hourly baffled by the im- 
possibility of free communication with the humble classes of 



Lect. xxx.] DIALECTS. 579 

many European countries, where the dialect changes almost at 
every post. 

The philanthropist may extract some consolation out of this 
confusion, in the reflection that the want of a community of 
speech, in countries of ancient, deep-rooted, and fixed institutions, 
though a great, is not an unmixed, evil. Like the corresponding 
peculiarities of local costume, occupation, and habits, it has its use 
in the scheme of Providence, as a means of checking the spread 
of popular excitements, and a too rapid movement of social 
changes, which, though ultimately beneficial, yet, like the rains 
of heaven, produce their best effect, when neither very hastily 
precipitated nor very frequently repeated. 

\Ve cannot, upon either side of the ocean, expect to be exempt 
from that general law of language, which, more than any thing 
else, argues it to be man's work, not his nature — the law of per- 
petual change. Man himself is immortal, immutable. His pas- 
sions, his appetites, his powers, are everywhere and at all times, 
in kind, almost in degree, substantially the same ; but whatsoever 
he fashions is infinite in variety of structure, frail in architecture, 
unstable in form, and transitory in duration. All this is emi- 
nently true of his language, and therefore, I repeat, to this law 
our speech must bow. But we may still avail ourselves of a great 
variety of means and circumstances peculiar to modern society, 
to retard the decay of our tongue, and to prevent its dissipation 
into a multitude of independent dialects. 

The original causes of dialectic difference are very obscure ; 
and, with the exception of those which depend on the physical 
influences of climate, they are usually very restricted in their ter- 
ritorial range. In countries naturally divided into numerous dis- 
tricts separated by mountains, rivers, marshes, or other obstacles 
to free intercommunication, every isolated locality has usually its 
own peculiarities of speech, more or less distinctly marked in 
proportion as the community is more or less cut off from inter- 
course with the nation at large. As the construction of roads, 
canals, and other means of transport, opens new channels and in- 
creased facilities of commerce, these peculiarities disappear ; and 
in all parts of the civilized world, such internal improvements 
are rapidly extending, and numerous local dialects, and even 
some independent languages, seem doomed to a speedy extinction. 



580 HAEMONIZINa rNTLUElS-CES. [Lect. xxx. 

The causes which tend to extirpate existing dialectic peculiari- 
ties, are even more powerfully influential in preventing the for- 
mation of diversities ; and the physical character of our own ter- 
ritory is such as to encourage the hope that our speech, which, if 
not absolutely homogeneous, is now employed by 40,000,000 of 
men, in one unbroken mass, with a uniformity of which there is 
perhaps no other example, will escape that division which has 
shattered some languages of the Old World into fragments like 
those of the confusion of Babel. The geography of the United 
States presents few localities suited to human habitation, that are 
at the same time inaccessible to modern improved modes of com- 
munication. The carriage-road, the railway, the telegraph, the 
mails, the newspaper, penetrate to every secluded nook, address 
themselves to every free inhabitant, and speak everywhere one 
and the same dialect. 

Independently of the influences of physical improvement, or 
rather perhaps as a fruit of it, there are circumstances in the con- 
dition of modern society which are constantly active in the eradi- 
cation of its minor differences, and in producing a general amal- 
gamation of all its constituents, and a harmony between all 
instrumentalities not inherently discordant. Men, though indi- 
vidually less stationary, less attached to locality, are becoming 
more gregarious in the mass ; the social element is more active, 
the notion of the solidarity and essential unity of particular na- 
tions, if not of the race, is more a matter of general conscious- 
ness; the interests of different classes and districts are more 
closely interwoven, and the operations of governments are more 
comprehensive and diffused, than at any former historical epoch. 
Look, for instance, at the influence of the monetary corporations 
connected with finance, with internal improvements, with fire- 
insurance, and with manufactures. The negotiability of their 
capital diffuses their proprietorship through wide regions of ter- 
ritory, through all classes of society. Their administration re- 
quires frequent communication between their shareholders, and 
between the direction and its numerous agents, as well as with the 
millions who in one way and another are affected by their opera- 
tions, and thus every one of these corporations, mischievous as in 
many respects their influence is, serves as a bond of connection, a 
means and an occasion of more intimate communication between 



Lect. xxx.] INFLUENCE OF FEINTING. 581 

citj and country, rude and cultivated, rich and poor. Add to 
these our great charities, the crowning glory of this age, which 
combine the efforts, harmonize the sympathies, and bring to- 
gether in free communion thousands, who, but for such attrac- 
tions, had never been led to act or think or speak in unison ; and 
further, our political associations, which gather their annual 
myriads to listen to the living voice of eloquence from the mouth 
of one orator nursed on the banks of the Mississippi, of another 
who learned his English in the lumber camps of Maine, and of a 
third who dwells by the lakes of the great Northwest — all speak- 
ing, and so all teaching, one dialect of one tongue. In like man- 
ner, our Government, acting through its army, its navy, its reve- 
nue-service, its post-office, is continually mingling, in all its de- 
partments, the separate ingredients of our population, communing 
daily with the remotest corners, everywhere employing, and forc- 
ing all alike to employ, one form of syntax, one standard of 
speech, one medium of thought. 

I believe the art of printing, especially by its creation of the 
periodical press, together with the general diffusion of education 
which the press alone has made possible, is the most efficient in- 
strumentality in producing uniformity of language and extirpat- 
ing distinctions of dialect. With modern facilities of transit and 
transport, and the present great tendency to centralization, the 
leading city periodicals are sure of almost universal circulation. 
They are more read and more quoted than any other sources of 
information. The improved accuracy of reporters makes the 
newspapers channels through which not the thoughts only, but 
almost the very accents of popular speakers, are published to the 
nation ; and so swift is our postal communication, that words ut- 
tered to-day by a great orator in New York, are repeated to-mor- 
row in every hamlet of a territory as large as the Spanish penin- 
sula. 

The influence of printing, and of a general ability to read, in 
first producing, and then maintaining, a uniformity of dialect, is 
remarkably and curiously exemplified in the Christian population 
of Hellas and Asia Minor. 

The modern Greeks, as they are called for reasons of conven- 
ience and because of their community of speech, are a people, or 
rather group of fragments of peoples, very diverse in their origin 



582 INFLUENCE OF PRINTING. [Lec.t. xxx. 

and very much scattered in their abodes, extending through the 
whole Turkish empire as well as the Hellenic territory proper, 
living in small communities, often separated by wide distances or 
by impassable natural barriers, surrounded by tribes speaking 
very different languages, and therefore exposed to continual and 
discordant corruptions of speech ; at the same time they have, in 
general, little relationship to the old Hellenic race, few common 
political interests, and little social or commercial intercourse. 
Their only bond of real union is their creed, which, among them, 
supplies the same place that community of blood does in other 
nations. The ancient Greeks, occupying the same localities, much 
more nearly allied in blood, more closely connected politically, 
possessing greater facilities and motives for personal intercom- 
munication, often gathering from their remotest colonies at the 
great metropolitan festivals of Athens, of Corinth, and other 
Hellenic cities, and, above all, possessed of a common literature 
whose choicest dainties were the daily bread of every Greek in- 
tellect, nevertheless, not only spoke, but wrote, in dialects distin- 
guished by palpable differences of articulation, inflection, syntax, 
and vocabulary. The modern Greeks, on the other hand, both 
speak and write, not indeed with entire uniformity, yet, saving 
some limited though remarkable local exceptions, with a general 
similarity of dialect very seldom found in languages whose terri- 
torial range is so great. 

~Now the influence which has been most active in produc- 
ing this remarkable uniformity, is the circulation of printed 
books and journals employing the same vocabulary, and follow- 
ing the same orthography and the same syntax. Like effects 
have resulted from the same cause in Germany. The dialects 
are dying out, just in proportion as the more general dissemina- 
tion of instruction multiplies readers and encourages the diffusion 
of printed matter. If printing has not yet conferred the same 
benefit upon Italy, it is because the detestable tyrannies, under 
which the peninsula has groaned for centuries, have fettered the 
press and excluded the masses from the advantages of education. 
Where there are neither books nor journals, there can be no 
readers ; and where language is not controlled and harmonized 
by literature, the colloquial speech will be variable, irregular, and 
discrepant. 



Lect. xxx.] INFLUENCE OF PEINTISrG. 583 

Of all countries known in history, the North American repub- 
lic is most conspicuously marked by the fusion, or rather the ab- 
sence, of rank and social distinctions, by community of interests, 
by incessant and all-pervading intercommunication, by the uni- 
versal diffusion of education, and by abundant facility of access, 
not only to the periodical conduits, but to the permanent reser- 
voirs of knowledge. The condition of England is in all these re- 
spects closely assimilated to that of the United States ; and not 
only the methods, but the instruments, of popular instruction are 
fast becoming the same in both ; and there is a growing convic- 
tion among the wise of the two great empires, that the highest 
interests of both will be promoted by reciprocal good-will and 
unrestricted intercourse, perilled by jealousies and estrangement. 

Favored, then, by the mighty elective affinities, the powerful 
harmonic attractions, which subsist between the American and 
the Englishman as brothers of one blood, one speech, one faith, 
we may reasonably hope that the Anglican tongue on both sides 
of the Atlantic, as it grows in flexibility, comprehensiveness, 
expression, wealth, will also more and more clearly manifest the 
organic unity of its branches, and that national jealousies, mate- 
rial rivalries, narrow interests, will not disjoin and shatter that 
great instrument of social advancement which God made one, as 
He made one the spirit of the nations that use it. 






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